In this dissertation, I connect aesthetics to two unusual areas: mathematics and meditation. In the first two essays, I argue that beauty and aesthetic experience make a difference to mathematical practice. A mathematical proof is very different from more familiar beauties, but I argue that what mathematicians call "beauty" really deserves the name. "No Mathematics Without Beauty" argues that mathematicians wouldn't be able to understand or create certain proofs without the capacity for aesthetic experience, and answers the objection that only (...) things perceived through the senses can be beautiful. "The Allure of Elegance" is a detailed case study which traces the role of aesthetic factors in the development of three related proofs of the Quadratic Reciprocity Theorem. In "Where Aesthetics Meets Meditation," I argue that meditation as well as aesthetic appreciation involves adopting an attitude of "accepting attention." This attitude transforms the character of pain, increases the number and intensity of aesthetic experiences, and is a special, "warm,'' kind of detachment. The last fact sheds new light on old aesthetic notions such as "distance" and "disinterest". (shrink)

This dissertation compares “subversive speech”—i.e., speech that challenges and destabilizes otherwise recognized authority—in the Latter Prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the early-to-middle dialogues of Plato. The biblical prophets have long been associated with subversive activity, such as critique of cult and king, which the corpus prominently thematizes in a variety of ways. Most historical-critical biblical scholarship has treated these issues only as windows onto the development of Israelite institutions or ancient social dynamics. Without denying these connections to historical realities, (...) I argue that more attention ought to be paid to how subversive speech is literarily constructed—how biblical authors and redactors used it to theorize prophecy. These literary constructs, I suggest, are themselves historical data even if they do not correspond to “actual” prophetic figures and activities. I make this case through a sustained comparison to Plato’s presentation of Socrates, which is relevant for two reasons. First, Socrates’s philosophical challenges to Athenian society are perhaps the closest ancient Mediterranean analogue to subversive prophecy. Second, the “literary turn” in recent Plato studies, which treats Plato’s Socrates as more a fictive character than a historical figure, provides a model for studying literary construction within a historical-critical framework. Ultimately, while acknowledging the important cultural, historical, and generic differences between the biblical prophetic literature and Plato’s dialogues, I argue that both corpora use subversive speech to problematize authority and to develop their respective orienting ideals: tôrâ in the biblical material, philosophy in the Platonic. The introductory chapter sets forth the problems that subversive prophetic speech poses, reviews previous approaches to these problems, and makes the case for addressing them through a historical-critical comparison with Plato. Each of the subsequent three chapters explores one mode in which both of these corpora construct subversive speech. Chapter 2, “From ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ to ‘Delphi and Deir ʿAlla’: The Divinatory Construction of Subversive Speech in Micah 6:1–8 and in the Apology,” argues that both corpora present subversive speech by coopting and transforming ancient Mediterranean divinatory phenomena. Chapter 3, “Subversive Speakers and Their Audiences: The Politics of Poetry in Ezekiel and in the Republic,” explores how they configure the poetic language of subversive speech in relation to its public function. Chapter 4, “The Subversive Construction of Superordinate Authority: Literary Framing in the Latter Prophets and in Socrates’s Last Days,” argues that both employ large-scale literary framing to contextualize subversive speech not as a transgression of authority but as an expression of a reconceptualized authoritative ideal. In the concluding chapter, I summarize my findings and suggest two potential avenues for further inquiry. (shrink)

This dissertation is an intellectual history of Muslim understandings of Qur’ānic Revelation from the first/seventh century to the fifth/eleventh century as presented in the Qur’ān, Sunni ḥadīth, Qur’ān commentary, Sunni kalām, Imami Shiʿi ḥadīth, and Shiʿi Ismaili philosophical theology. The study conceptualizes diverse Islamic theologies of revelation through an analytical framework featuring three hierarchical dimensions: 1) a Revelatory Principle representing differing conceptions of God’s Speech and Writing ; 2) a Revelatory Process describing various modes of divine/angelic sending down and inspiration (...) through the Prophet Muhammad, and 3) Revelatory Products including qur’ānic recitation, scripture, the Prophetic Sunna, and the Shiʿi Imamate. The dissertation argues that Sunni and Shiʿi Muslims understood Qur’ānic Revelation through competing and often mutually contradictory models constructed within different historical and theological contexts. The revelatory models that developed through the fifth/eleventh century fall into four types: 1) the “qur’ānic model” in which the Prophet formulates divinely inspired Arabic qur’āns and prophetic guidance as adaptations of God’s transcendent writing; 2) the “scriptural models” from Sunni tafsīr in which the Qur’ān as God’s book pre-exists in heaven and is then sent down to earth; 3) the “theological divine speech models” in Sunni kalām that center on God’s uncreated/created speech and its manifestation as the Arabic Qur’ān and the Prophetic Sunna; 4) the “divine inspiration models” in Imami Shiʿi ḥadīth and Shiʿi Ismaili thought that frame the Qur’ān as a divinely inspired composition of the Prophet that manifests God’s transcendent word and requires the Imams’ revelatory hermeneutics to be comprehended. The dissertation’s argument culminates by highlighting and contextualizing Imami Shiʿi and Ismaili understandings of revelation espoused by certain Shiʿi Imams and Ismaili dāʿīs – including Imam al-Ṣādiq, Imam al-Muʿizz, al-Rāzī, the Brethren of Purity, al-Sijistānī, al-Nuʿmān, al-Kirmānī, al-Mu’ayyad, and Nāṣir-i Khusraw. It demonstrates that Ismaili models in particular constitute a unique alternative to Sunni views of revelation by offering competing and vastly different accounts of the Revelatory Principle, Process, and Products. (shrink)

The religious character of Indus Sufism is marked by its devotion to the living presence of Sufi saints at their tombs. In much previous scholarship on Sufism, the tomb has not figured prominently. This has inadvertently marginalized the worship of the saints at their shrines into a kind of ethnographically rich yet still epiphenomenal element in the history of Sufism, a view that sees it as much more a matter of “discourse” than a lived experience. This dissertation addresses the problem (...) of how most authentically to interpret popular religious devotion at Sufi saints’ tombs; I argue that we need to begin by re-centering these shrines in our studies. In the case of Pakistan, the state has carried out a systematic program of reform to gradually suppress the devotional energy generated at the Sufi shrines of the Indus valley. In line with a particular trajectory of religious thinking, the state has sought to fashion the hagiographic identities of Indus Sufi saints into more normative models of piety: directly regulating Sufi shrines, promoting specific ritual interventions, and treating the saint’s body as that of a deceased mortal rather than a posthumously powerful channel of the Divine. Since the 19th century, reformist groups such as the Deobandīs and Barelwīs were theologically at odds with one other regarding the ritual of supplication at saints’ shrines. Despite this disagreement between Deobandīs and Barelwīs, both schools insist that all mystical experience must be subservient to strictures of Islamic law. This legal discourse was exported to Pakistan, and there it has led many religious scholars to push the state to encourage the recitation of the fātiḥa, a Qur’ānic verse commonly employed in sending merit to the dead, as the correct way of observing ziyāra at Sufi shrines and graves. This ritual intervention is aimed at reversing the metaphysics of posthumous divine union achieved by the saint by stressing that the departed Sufi saint is dead. Through legal reasoning, religious scholars have sought similarly to negate other ritual practices that celebrate the power of deceased saints to communicate with their followers. (shrink)

This dissertation looks at how Sanskrit philosophers grappled with the question of how we acquire knowledge on the basis of what others tell us. In particular, it examines Sanskrit interreligious debates on the epistemic status of testimony, and specifically, religious testimony. I analyze these debates primarily through the work of Jayanta Bhaṭṭa, a 9th century Kashmiri Nyāya philosopher, as well as the works of his Buddhist and Mīmāṃsaka interlocutors. Through a close reading and intertextual analysis of these works, I engage (...) historically and philosophically with the key issues in these debates. In particular, I look at Jayanta’s examination of the following set of related questions: 1) whether, and the conditions under which, testimony is a source of knowledge, 2) why, on the basis of practical factors, religious testimony merits different epistemic treatment than mundane types of testimony, and 3) how to approach the challenge of religious disagreement, particularly, disagreement stemming from mutually conflicting scriptural traditions. In examining these debates, I argue that differences in opinion over the epistemic status of testimony boil down to a disagreement over the proper relationship between the individual epistemic agent and the broader social and practical world. In particular, this disagreement centers on who bears the brunt of epistemic responsibility in testimonial exchanges, the speaker or the recipient, and whether practical factors, like stakes-considerations and interests, affect the strength of a subject’s epistemic position. I also approach these debates through the conceptual resources of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of religion in order to help clarify complex Sanskrit philosophical arguments and ultimately underscore the relevance of Sanskrit texts to contemporary discussions. In particular, I argue for the usefulness of certain theoretical frameworks and principles for understanding Jayanta’s work, primarily, the thesis of pragmatic encroachment, which claims that pragmatic factors can affect the level of epistemic support a subject needs for certain beliefs. Additionally, I argue that Jayanta’s unique approach to the problem of religious disagreement, especially his consideration of the socio-practical factors that affect the epistemic status of belief, might help break some of the deadlock in contemporary theorizing on intractable religious disagreement. (shrink)

This Margaret Mann Phillips lecture of 2018 examines Erasmus’s relationships with his amanuenses, building on the work of Franz Bierlaire and others. It especially considers when and why members of Erasmus’s familia appeared in print in his works. Mention of servants functioned in a variety of ways to allay the author’s responsibility for features of the text that might be criticized. Manuscript evidence also shows Erasmus working with his amanuenses in the preparation of publications and indexes in particular.

This dissertation comprises three chapters, each of which is concerned with a normative topic having to do with death. Chapter 1, “Against Deprivationism,” is concerned with the deprivationist thesis that a person’s death is bad for her if and only if, and because and to the extent that, it makes her life worse for her than it otherwise would have been. I argue that deprivationism is probably false. Chapter 2, “Some Versions of Lucretius’ Puzzle,” is concerned with Lucretius’ Puzzle, very (...) roughly the question whether anything rationally recommends preferring later death to earlier death over preferring earlier creation to later creation. I distinguish among several different versions of this question and argue that we ought to answer some but not all of them in the affirmative. Chapter 3, “Numbers, Ratios, and Parity,” is concerned with the question whether it is the case that, although you are morally required, ceteris paribus, to prevent the deaths of two people rather than the death of one other person when you cannot prevent all three of these deaths, you are not morally required, ceteris paribus, to prevent the deaths of 1,001 people rather than the deaths of 1,000 other people when you cannot prevent all 2,001 of these deaths. I defend an affirmative answer to this question. (shrink)

This dissertation appraises the role of public education in modern American life. Tax-supported neighborhood schools called common schools have shaped American culture since they became widespread starting in the 1840s. The private higher educational institutions which emerged after the Civil War in the 1870s, however, are attributed greater cultural influence and are more readily associated with the intellectual public sphere that took shape in postbellum democracy. The work investigates this discrepancy by examining the intellectual contributions of public education: that is, (...) by considering the experience of non-professional intellects schools always set out to serve. One of the most self-aware undertakings in public education occurred in St. Louis, Missouri, around the Civil War, and was led by a group of educators who developed a philosophy concerned with the historical process, which they viewed as central to the work of education. I use archival sources documenting their activities to tell a story public education built around this philosophical movement in St. Louis. The first chapter places the philosophical culture of St. Louis in the context of a city that condoned slavery but aligned with the Union during civil war. The second chapter tracks the rise of St. Louis education system alongside the rise of a national public education after the war. The third chapter examines the country’s first public kindergartens—built in St. Louis—which emblematized the ideals of schools in which every individual had creative potential. The fourth chapter meditates on the built form of the schools to show how the value of creativity made for a common culture of schooling, a conclusion the chapter links to emancipation in the war. The dissertation suggests that schools in St. Louis developed a unique intellectual culture built around lower education. As one to extends her view of modern intellectual experience beyond elite universities, public schooling reveals a remarkable transformation in secular American thought stemming from the Civil War. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often associated with a certain political form of relating to another as a person, where a person is seen as a locus of enforceable demands. Nevertheless, as I argue in this dissertation, Rousseau also articulated an affective form of relating to another, where relating to another as a person in this sense involves seeing them as a locus of a kind of value that cannot be demanded. I consider the significance of this affective form for Rousseau’s understanding (...) of the passion he calls amour-propre, as well for his understanding of domination and of the connection between the political and affective realms. Following an introductory chapter, I argue in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 that, against received readings of Rousseau, there is something intrinsically good about being subject to amour-propre in that this passion makes salient to us others’ personhood. In Chapter 4 I consider one way in which the characteristic pathology of the affective realm is the appearance of demands in it. I show how, in a certain kind of domination, the dominator acknowledges the affective personhood of the dominated and at the same time, by treating the dominated’s consideration as the sort of value that can be extracted, is in violation of the very conditions of that acknowledgment. In Chapter 5 I outline Rousseau’s understanding of the connection between the political and affective forms of relating to another by arguing that Rousseau introduces the former as an essential part of the egalitarian measures he proposes for eliminating the necessity of entering relationships of domination. I then contrast Rousseau’s understanding of the connection between the political and the affective realms with contemporary Kantian accounts that condense political and affective phenomena into a single conception of a person. In Appendix 1 I consider the kind of dependence on another person involved in speaking to them. I discuss how that dependence is made apparent when we are insulted in not being believed, and I compare the views of Rousseau and Adam Smith regarding that kind of insult. Finally, in Appendix 2 I bring Rousseau’s notion of acknowledging another as a person to bear on an interpretation of the work of the Spanish filmmaker Víctor Erice. (shrink)

This dissertation begins with a discussion of the problem of God’s knowledge of particulars in Avicenna’s thought, demonstrating a gradual shift in his treatment of the subject. The subsequent chapters present an overview of the way a number of leading philosophers and theologians of the following two centuries responded to Avicenna’s writings on God’s knowledge, with special attention to the highly controversial issue of whether and how God can know particulars, such as individual human beings. More specifically, the second chapter (...) analyzes the work of Avicenna’s followers Bahmanyār and Lawkarī, as well as of Abū ‘l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī’s critical response and the counter-response it incited. The third chapter focuses on three theological critiques by Ghazālī, Shahrastānī, and Ibn al-Malāḥimī, discussing the way their ideologies have affected the exact criticisms they leveled against Avicenna. The final chapter offers a study of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s thought on the extent of God’s knowledge, with emphasis on his indebtedness to earlier scholars discussed in the previous chapters. Two overarching themes traced throughout the dissertation are the diverse views on the nature of knowledge and the formation of a multifaceted post-Avicennan intellectual tradition. (shrink)

It is possible that, as you read this, there is someone out there standing in for you, speaking in your voice, acting in your stead, making agreements on your behalf, or conceding a point you might not have wanted them to. They are not your congressperson, your lawyer, or your spouse—nor anyone else authorized by means of a formal, corporately organized election or selection procedure. There is another sort of representative out there, someone you did not elect, someone you perhaps (...) would not elect, of whom you may never have heard, speaking or acting on your behalf right now—they are an informal political representative. -/- Formal political representation is a familiar topic within democratic theory. Much less discussed, though no less widespread, is informal political representation: a practice in which a person speaks or acts for a group before an audience, despite never having been elected or selected to do so by means of a corporately organized election or selection procedure. Informal political representation is an everyday feature of our public communicative landscape. It is woven taut into the fabric of our political lives. Malala Yousafzai claims: “I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard.” U2 frontman Bono claims to “represent a lot of people who have no voice at all.” President Trump, before his nomination, was said “to give a voice to those who have long felt silenced." -/- The informal representative, though neither elected nor selected, is ubiquitous and politically influential. They increase the visibility of marginalized and oppressed groups, give voice to interests not adequately expressed in formal political fora, influence public discourse, and serve as conduits between the represented and policymakers. They can, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., did in Montgomery, negotiate on a group’s behalf. But so far, few have attempted to provide a theory of this phenomenon that gives full attention to both its conceptual and normative foundations. My dissertation provides a theory of informal political representation that does not treat the phenomenon as a mere deviant case of formal political representation, but rather takes informal political representation on its own terms. -/- Committee: Tommie Shelby (chair), Tim Scanlon, Dick Moran, Eric Beerbohm. (shrink)

This dissertation engages the intellectual adventure to empirically determine the size and shape of the universe – to imagine, measure, and map the cosmos in the long 20th century. This journey developed in three stages, which in broad strokes can be seen as imagining and theorizing, modeling, and testing the shape of space; my account complicates this narrative, demonstrating the role that mathematical imagination played at the core of each stage. Late-19th-century mathematical advances regarding non-Euclidean geometry and intrinsic curvature encouraged (...) growing numbers of mathematicians and astronomers to pursue the possibility of astronomically measuring the curvature of space. Part I historicizes the revolutionary mathematical world in which the French mathematician, celestial mechanist, and physicist Henri Poincaré established the “hyperbolic crystal” at the heart of mathematics. Part II explores the remarkable puzzle posed by Poincaré in 1892 about fictional beings in a “Hyperbolic World” creating their geometry and physics. Poincaré saw the need for a “new geometry,” analysis situs, to distinguish between spaces which admit the same metric and yet have topologically-distinct “shapes.” He set out single-handedly to create it. Part III features the co-revolutionizing worlds of of mathematics and theoretical physics in Poincaré’s mathematical corpus, Hermann Minkowski’s development of spacetime theory, Einstein’s development of general relativity, and emerging relativistic cosmological models of the universe. I show how Poincaré’s mathematical creations were intensely studied and absorbed by Göttingen mathematicians and scientists, thereby shaping the practice of 20th-century mathematics and physics. The profound topological concepts and tools that originated with Poincaré’s analysis situs served, together with increasingly sophisticated tools of observational cosmology, as a means to interrogate the cosmos and potentially to establish its shape. The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation – the “first light” of the universe, remnant heat from the big bang – became after its discovery in 1964 a primary observational means to explore the universe at its largest scales. I assess how in the 1990s cosmologists and mathematicians exchanged ideas and practices in assessing data from NASA’s satellite mission Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer and its implications for the shape of space. (shrink)

What are the passions? And what, if anything, do they have to do with our intellectual lives? I argue that, according to Aristotle, the passions are complex states that carry information about the value things have. More specifically, Aristotelian passions are constituted by fine-grained evaluative appearances—a kind of truth-apt, cognitive, yet non-rational representation that non-human animals also entertain. Given that the passions are representations of value, they can be the basis for coming to know and understand the peculiar value of (...) things. So, the passions can serve as grounds for intellectual achievements that are essential to a good life. In particular, I argue that, for Aristotle, the passions contribute substantively to three intellectual achievements that are required for a flourishing life: practical wisdom, certain instances of contemplation, and the appreciation of art. Since Aristotelian passions carry rich information and discriminate value, they are cognitive states that can shape and enrich not only our lives as agents, but also our lives as knowers. The passions can play an epistemic role by serving as warrant for intellectually discerning the normative features of the situations we inhabit, the kinds of characters that surround us, and what is good and fine in them and us. Furthermore, in virtue of their epistemic role, the passions can be the basis for the intellectual aspects of a moral education. (shrink)

This dissertation analyses three texts from China’s Warring States period : the Wu Xing 五行, the “Tianzhi” 天志 Triplet of the Mozi 墨子, and the “Neipian” 內篇 of the Zhuangzi 莊子. It contends that reading these three texts according to their shared concern of philosophical practice demonstrates that each one presents a general theory of how to live one’s daily life. The texts construct their theories by first presenting patterns of daily behavior. They then use the relationship between Heaven and (...) their presumed practitioners to organize those daily patterns into “ways of being” or “existential modes”: comprehensive, philosophical lifestyles that form in relation to Heaven’s ideal. In addition to explicitly arguing for its respective theory, each text also emphasizes its key ideas through a fractal reiteration of themes across multiple levels of content and rhetoric that establishes itself as a textual facsimile of the mode that it advocates. That reiteration also helps construct an “implicit dialogue” between text and reader in which the text attempts to transform the reader into a practitioner. While previous scholarship has noted the importance of practice within early Chinese texts, it has done so according to frameworks that conflate the arguments of multiple works and overemphasize the texts’ contextual specificity, preventing contemporary readers from regarding them as sources of general theory. By contrast, this study uses the three texts as case studies to demonstrate the theoretical sophistication and contemporary relevance of early Chinese thought. (shrink)

This project investigates medical decision making in Greco-Roman antiquity, using modern studies of cognitive bias, heuristics, and the development of expert intuition as a lens through which to view the theoretical constructs and practical instructions of the physicians of the past. The epistemology of the physicians and medical writers of antiquity has been examined extensively by successive generations of scholars, with more recent efforts confronting the issue of heuristics explicitly. Past and present endeavors have focused on the epistemological approaches of (...) various medical sects, noting similarities and differences in how these groups elicited, privileged, analyzed, classified, organized, and applied information related to their patients and the problems from which they were suffering. Focusing on the practical aspects of decision making that surround diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, this dissertation evaluates ancient Greco-Roman clinical decision making through the lens of modern cognitive decision-making theory. The source material evaluated in the dissertation is presented chronologically, arranged according to broad epochs of medical practitioners: the Hippocratic corpus, the Alexandrian anatomists Herophilus and Erasistratus, the Empiricists, the Methodists, and Galen. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter outlining the theoretical approach used. Comparison of these epistemological groups, with reference to modern studies of heuristics and the development of expert intuition, demonstrates that shifts in the limits of observability of anatomical and physiological phenomena encouraged re-evaluation of disease categories and reassessment of how information from a clinical encounter was privileged. Practitioners of antiquity were often aware of the benefits and pitfalls of the nosological and diagnostic systems they used, and the revision of their epistemological approaches over time reflects self-conscious attempts to redress flaws in these thought patterns. (shrink)

Purpose: To examine the historical dimensions and ethical boundaries of medical repatriation, particularly as they relate to patients, health care providers, and hospitals. Methods: The methods employed in this analysis are rooted in the traditions and techniques of modern philosophy, medical ethics, and applied ethical theory. Results: After exploration and critical evaluation of the history and motivations behind medical repatriation, considerations against the practice are advanced. Drawing on the ethical dimensions of informed consent, equality, distributive justice, transparency, and trust, the (...) tension between medical repatriation and the ethical duties of health care providers is assessed. Conclusions: At this time of great change in health care and immigration policy, clarity about our ethical obligations to undocumented immigrants is crucial if we are to create systems that are not only efficient, coordinated, and technologically sophisticated but also equitable for those who are vulnerable. (shrink)

Empathy is a familiar form of emotionally charged imaginative perspective taking. In this dissertation I offer an account of empathy’s moral importance that emphasizes the special value of its unique epistemic functions. Specifically, I defend what I call the humane understanding thesis: empathy is the source of a distinct epistemic good, humane understanding, which consists in the appreciation of the intelligibility of others’ emotional perceptions, and humane understanding is necessary for fully virtuous relations with other people. Adam Smith held that (...) empathy is the unique means by which we judge the propriety of other’s emotions. I draw out the kernel of truth in this surprising claim. Emotions inevitably present the world in a certain evaluative light. When I see my situation as calling out for my anger, or fear, or adoration, my emotion appears to me to be properly responsive to my situation. I can judge my emotion to be inappropriate, all things considered. However, I cannot both be angry at your betrayal and be totally mystified by my own anger, or resent you but see no absolutely nothing in your conduct that appears to call out for my resentment. This insight applies to empathy. When we empathize, we feel genuine emotions. And when we feel these emotions, we cannot fail to appreciate the intelligibility of the other’s original emotion first-hand. This appreciation constitutes humane understanding of the other’s emotion. I further clarify the nature of this epistemic achievement by distinguishing it from two other nearby forms of understanding, one that is achieved through narrative rather than perspective taking, and one that is achieved through unemotional perspective taking. Empathy has recently come in for some heavy criticism. It has been described as not only morally unnecessary, but positively morally corrosive. Recognizing that empathy is the unique means by which we secure humane understanding of others’ emotional perceptions enables us to appreciate aspects of empathy’s moral significance that its most prominent detractors have neglected. Humane understanding is a powerful way of being close to another person, and closeness is something that social beings like ourselves crave, not for any further or deeper purpose, but just because it is valuable to us in and of itself. People have a powerful need to be empathized with because empathy relieves a painful form of loneliness. Empathy can be a way of caring, rather than just a means of getting us to care. In further defense of empathy’s moral significance, I also argue that empathy has a meaningful role to play in the development of both our reflective beliefs about moral properties and our emotional sensitivity to those same properties. Empathy can allow us to discover new moral distinctions through imaginative emotional experience, and it can also help us to shape and sharpen our moral emotional perception. Finally, I round out my review of empathy’s moral significance with an argument that empathy with others makes it very difficult to intend to treat them in certain immoral ways. We cannot both empathize with someone and see them as unfeeling, as unthinking, or as lacking a normative perspective on the world. Consequently, empathizing with someone is at least not compatible with treating them as a mere object. I offer my Smithian picture of empathy’s moral and epistemic functions as an alternative to the popular Humean view that empathy moves us from our default position of solipsism and egoism to knowledge of and care for other’ inner lives. That view’s ambition is tantalizing, but it distorts both the nature of empathy and the nature of our other-oriented concern and understanding. Hume’s account of empathy’s significance, and the more recent accounts that take after it, end up making it look as though empathy simply contributes to the expansion of egoism, and/or as though empathy depends for its motivational efficacy on a kind of epistemic mistake. (shrink)

Inquiry is central to our lives as knowers. From the quotidian ‘where did I leave my keys’ to the most momentous of research questions, we update our beliefs via inquiries large and small every day. Plausibly then, we achieve a much more complete picture of agents’ epistemic lives when we take into account not just what they believe or know but also the questions they have open for inquiry. Such is the approach to epistemology that motivates my dissertation. The enclosed (...) papers present an account of inquiry from the perspective of philosophy of mind. The account provides sufficient conditions on being in inquiry and also has much to say about the attitudes of inquiring and questioning agents, like doubt and suspension of judgment. The account thus provides a framework for determining which questions an agent has open for inquiry and is a starting place for an inquiry-based epistemology. In “Is Suspension an Inquiring State of Mind?,” I put pressure on Jane Friedman’s claim that suspending judgment is sufficient for being in inquiry. While the main force of the argument is critical, the paper unfolds the terrain of the mental states of inquirers and sets the terms in which my own view is framed. “Committing to Inquiry” then is the heart of my account. The project of the paper is to lay out sufficient conditions on an agent’s being in inquiry. I argue that inquiry begins with a commitment to a focal question, this commitment takes the form of an intention, and only such an intention is sufficient for inquiring. Finally, in “Room for Doubt” I explore an application of the picture defended in the previous chapters. I argue that, in my framework, doubt is best understood not as a doxastic attitude but as the process of considering whether to revise one’s belief-commitments. (shrink)

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant declares that our consciousness of the moral law is a “fact of reason,” and that this fact suffices to establish the reality of moral obligation. With this doctrine, Kant asserts that a “deduction” of morality, such as he attempted in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, is neither necessary nor possible. This reversal has seemed to some commentators to be a retreat to the pre-critical dogmatism that the Critique of Pure Reason positioned (...) itself against. I defend the doctrine of the fact of reason against this charge, arguing that the doctrine is not just consistent with, but in fact an expression of, the fundamental methodological commitments of critique. The lynchpin of my defense is a conception of the critical method according to which critique relies on a form of self-cognition that has its basis in the subject’s pure apperception. In chapter one, I give an account of pure apperception according to which it is the subject’s consciousness of engaging in the activity of thought. In chapter two, I argue that the pure apperceptive form of thought makes available a form of self-cognition, labeled “reflection,” on the basis of which critique can be undertaken. Crucially, critique’s presumption of our rational autonomy includes the presumption of a capacity for reflective self-cognition. In chapter three, I argue that the self-consciousness of autonomous agency is identical to the pure apperception of moral deliberation and action. This fact, along with the moral law’s status as a fundamental practical principle, entails that a deduction of the moral law is impossible. Finally, in chapter four, I argue that Kant’s invocation of a “fact of reason” indicates the second Critique’s reliance on a distinctively practical mode of reflection. This is no lapse into dogmatism, but rather an expression of critique’s commitment to the autonomy of reason. (shrink)

This is a study of the philosophy of practical action in the Great Perfection poetry and spiritual exercises of the fourteenth century Tibetan author, Longchen Rabjampa Drime Ozer. I inquire into his claim that practices may be completely spontaneous, uncaused, and effortless and what this claim might reveal about the conditions of possibility for action. Although I am interested in how Longchenpa understands spontaneous practices, I also question whether the very categories of practice and theory are useful for interpreting his (...) writings. In taking up these questions, I maintain that Longchenpa’s texts can contribute to inquiries into the nature of human practices and action that is relevant today. It is my aspiration that this dissertation may facilitate engagement with Longchenpa’s reflections on the nature of liberative practice by thinkers in post-Heideggerian continental philosophy, especially in relation to conceptions of intentionality, causality, agency, ethics, and free will. The study begins with the historical context for issues of spontaneous practice relevant for Longchenpa’s Great Perfection tradition in fourteenth century Tibet. Following from this context, I then present four different interpretations of causal action, which I call the “four configurations.” Comprising the second part of the study, my examination of each of these configurations will consist in an exploration of what I argue are four primary ways to construe the nature of practice in terms of intentionality, theories, and causality. The first configuration addresses spiritual exercises that begin with theoretical views that are deliberately applied in actions. The second configuration focuses on methods that begin with embodied practices. The third configuration explores metaphysical foundations for actions. The fourth configuration looks to tacit social practices and networks of relationships as conditions for methods of ethical self-cultivation. Yet each of these characterizations fall short of what I will argue is Longchenpa’s understanding of practical action. Each of these configurations fail to provide the most satisfying, and in the end accurate, model of the process by which human beings perform freedom. The central chapters of the thesis bring together the history of Buddhist spiritual exercises, Longchenpa’s writings, and selected issues from contemporary philosophy and sociology of practice. I will show how Longchenpa’s spontaneous practice theory challenges some of the most basic assumptions about practices, and questions whether even well-meaning techniques or manipulations can lead to freedom. In the process of this critical reading, I will also be able to glean affirmative aspects of Longchenpa’s approach. Once we suspend the first configuration we can see Longchenpa’s phenomenology of knowledge. Going beyond the second configuration allows me to point to his conceptions of time and an effortlessness style in his instructions for spiritual exercises, which, I argue, is distinct from many interpretations of “sudden” conceptions of Buddhist practice. Going beyond the third configuration allows us to garner a sense of groundless potentiality in actions. And finally, interrupting the fourth configuration provides an opportunity to discern Longchenpa’s spontaneous ontological ethics. My primary thesis is that if practices are preconceived to be causal, teleological, and intentional, they will be predetermined in terms of an imperative to produce effects. Some form of willfulness becomes necessary to mediate between theory, action, and agency. Therefore, to allow for spontaneous practices, there can be neither a theoretical nor a practical a priori foundation and they must be freed from causality and object-directedness. This observation calls into question the entire metaphysics in which the western apparatus of practice and ethics is thinkable. I would like to put the meanings of practice into the form of a question. Longchenpa will help us to reawaken a sense of wonder and uncertainty about the practical. (shrink)

Paper 1: The Right to Health and the Power to Punish If prisoners have a moral right to health, then why should this be so? Moral rights do not depend on any legal systems or other social institutions; instead, they place demands on what laws and institutions we should have. They are shown to exist by moral argument. What arguments or rationales might justify a moral RTH for prisoners? How one may answer this question depends on whether we should generally (...) see all people as having a RTH. If one believes that people do not generally have this right, then one needs to explain why protecting health is of such moral importance that we should have obligations to meet prisoners’ health needs when we do not owe them similar obligations in relation to other needs. Furthermore, one also needs to explain why prisoners should have a RTH while other people should not. The standard argument offered by those on this side is that prisoners are a special case of people to whom we owe assistance meeting their health needs because certain health needs may lead to harms and suffering so serious that not assisting them would constitute cruel or inhumane punishment, or torture. They argue that since people have a right to be free from torture, then society has obligations to protect and promote prisoners’ health. I show that this argument is self-defeating: either it cannot adequately explain the obligation to assist prisoners in meeting health needs, or it cannot explain why nonprisoners should not also be owed similar assistance. iii By contrast, if one believes that people generally do have a RTH, then one is called on to justify this view by showing that a RTH follows from a general theory of justice and health, such as that developed by Norman Daniels. Provided such a theory, then the burden of showing that it is permissible to punish people in ways that involve restricting this right is on those who contend as much. In this context, the strongest objections to the view that prisoners have a RTH involve claims that the principles of justice that ground our RTH also allow punishments that involve imposing restrictions on it. I show that these objections to a theory like Daniels’s are either unsound, or overstated. Paper 2: Health and Health System Reform in the Colombian Prison System Between 1998 and 2015 Background: The WHO Regional Office for Europe recommends that responsibility for prison health should be transferred from the ministries of justice or interior to the national health authority, and that the provision of healthcare in prison should be contracted to the general health system. There is little evidence to support these recommendations, however, and it is not obvious that they are applicable to contexts beyond Europe. Colombia introduced reforms to its prison health systems similar to those recommended by the WHO/Europe between 1998 and 2016, making it an interesting case to study. Methods: We evaluated these reforms using a mixed-methods approach comprising documentary analysis of secondary sources, institutional-ethnographic research, key-informant interviews, and a health survey among a probability sample of inmates in a large prison located in Bogota. Using WHO’s “building blocks” framework, we analyzed changes to the prison health system’s organization and governance, financing, health workforce, accessibility of essential medicines, and the delivery of health services. iv Results: Between 1998 and 2015, Colombia integrated the prison and general health care systems — which historically were independent from each other with parallel governance, financing, and healthcare delivery mechanisms — by transferring the responsibility for prisoners’ healthcare from the National Institute of Prisons and Correctionals to insurance agencies and service providing institutions contracted from the general health system. Most of the changes that were introduced during this period were reversed in 2016: the prison health system was once again segmented from the general health system and a new institutional arrangement was created to take charge of it. Conclusions: None of the reforms appear to have achieved progress towards the realization of prisoners’ right to health. Instead, our findings suggest that the reforms may have been retrogressive. Paper 3: Justice and Medical Professionalism: Should Doctors be Accountable Patient Advocates? Medical professionalism has traditionally been thought to require a kind of partisanship that bars doctors from giving weight in their clinical decision-making to considerations other than about their own patients’ best interests. This traditional view implies that doctors should not be required to play the role of steward of shared health-system resources, since stewards are accountable to all those who have a stake in how those resources are used for the reasonableness and fairness of their resource-allocation decisions. A division of labor is often proposed to preserve doctors’ role as their patients devoted advocates by assigning the role of steward to administrators or policymakers. Stewards must restrict doctors’ clinical autonomy and authority as necessary to ensure they stay within the limits required by justice. However, many doctors believe that these restrictions impinge on their ability to pursue their patients’ best interests, and thus necessarily pose a threat to what is valuable in medical professionalism. It appears that we face a dilemma: justice requires stewardship, yet medical professionalism allegedly rules it out. Some commentators have suggested that the right response to this dilemma is to make a direct claim that justice should be primary in guiding the design of social institutions, including professional roles and their norms. This implies that we must rethink the traditional view that doctors’ clinical-decision making must be guided exclusively by a concern for their own patients’ bests interests. Yet many people believe that the traditional conception of medical professionalism captures the kind of doctor-patient relationships that we would ideally want. So, they might worry that revising this conception necessarily means that we must instead settle for a less desirable version of medical professionalism. My goal in this essay is to address this worry. My central thesis is that it is possible to articulate a conception of medical professionalism that is worth valuing, but whose requirements do not clash with those of justice in the way the traditional view suggest. I shall try to show that the conflict between the role of patient advocate and that of steward of shared resources is largely overstated by the traditional view, because it ignores that the values that underlie the requirements of patient advocacy also depend on the value that underlies the need to set limits to it, namely, justice. (shrink)

This dissertation considers a grouping of films in the former USSR, France, and Japan from the perspective of the political aesthetics they aim to create. These films, usually considered avant-garde documentaries, provide complementary and transnational examples of a freer and more affect-driven Marxist political filmmaking practice that likely originated with Dziga Vertov in the USSR. Rather than simply transmitting a tendentious political message, Vertov and others try to emancipate the viewer's political sensibility through a series of disruptive and playful aesthetic (...) techniques. By utilizing what Friedrich Schiller and Jacques Rancière call ‘free aesthetic play,’ these documentaries free the viewer from the ballast of habit. This emancipatory political filmmaking did not end with Vertov, and forms a trajectory: importantly, it reappears with the failure of political change on a mass societal scale. Faced with the disappointment of political movements which emphasize a simple transmission of text from government and citizen, artists instead attempt to use cinema as a tool for a personal, and political, transformation. This tendency thus re-emerges in France and Japan in the 1960s during their own failing revolutionary moments: Mai ’68 in France, and the protests against ANPO in Japan. However, the films created from these political avant-garde movements vary in success: while many Japanese filmmakers from the 1960s exhibit the playful and estranging qualities of Vertov’s films, French filmmakers post-1968, especially the Dziga Vertov Group, are quite didactic, and differ significantly from free aesthetic play, and from Vertov’s own productions; although they aim to emancipate, the films’ anti-pleasurable tendencies serve instead to alienate the viewer. This dissertation thus unearths a political avant-gardist tendency that highlights a politics of emancipation rather than transmission, and is defined by play, affect, and formalist estrangement. It is grounded in theories of politics and aesthetics, especially Walter Benjamin and Jacques Rancière, and stems from archival research in the National Diet Library and the Sogestu Art Center in Japan. (shrink)

On the reception of the sound figures, an eighteenth-century acoustical experiment, in the writings of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. It focuses especially on the philosophical ramifications for literary studies and the history of science.

Many people believe that morality is objective. My dissertation explores whether we have good grounds for this belief, and whether we should find it troubling if we do not. I defend negative answers to both questions. The first two chapters aim to undermine claims that we have good grounds to believe that morality is objective. The third chapter makes the case that moral normativity is essentially intersubjective, and no less respectable for that fact. Chapter 1 poses a skeptical challenge for (...) several promising rationales for moral objectivity. I argue that we can undermine rational confidence in these views by reflecting on the unreliability of the processes that lead us to find the views plausible, and so worth defending, in the first place. Chapter 2 criticizes an approach that treats claims about moral objectivity as nothing more than abstract, first-order moral claims. This approach would treat the skeptical challenge as a form of substantive moral skepticism that we should reject either because it is self-contradictory or because it is implausible on first-order moral grounds. I argue that we lack good grounds to accept this approach, and so that the skeptical challenge survives. Chapter 3 articulates and defends Intersubjectivism, which treats moral normativity as essentially intersubjective. I argue that we create and maintain moral normativity together by participating in relationships of mutual recognition and accountability. Intersubjectivism casts us as co-authors of morality’s authority, and treats moral normativity as arising from the practical authority we grant one another to make claims within moral relationships. (shrink)

A word or an image is not a gentle breeze that plays lightly across the surface of things and leaves them unaltered. Whether an artist tells a story, makes a film, writes a poem, or puts on a play, he or she is acting in the world via the act of representation. Prior to the ethical implications of what is said—the myriad ideologies and agendas that a work might pursue—there is the ethical step at the heart of all semiotics: words (...) and images are never quite what they wish to be. Merely by coming into being, all artistic texts participate in a certain kind of transgression. Dante Alighieri expressed his uneasiness with the dialectics of truth and falsehood in a memorable image: his pilgrim protagonist descended into the depths of the inferno on the back of a monster named Geryon, who was—simultaneously—an extremely useful vehicle and an embodiment of the darkest and most deeply human sin, fraud. To narrate a “true” story, Dante was paradoxically forced to corral a blatant untruth, a creature with the very face of a lie. Such is the Pact of Geryon: the acceptance of transgression as a path towards productive speech. “The Pact of Geryon: An Italian Theory of Ethics and Representation” examines ethical and structural questions about representation in selected works from the past two hundred years of artistic production in Italy, including poetry, prose, theater, and film. The goal of this sustained argument is, in part, to reposition metaliterariness and self-reflexivity as a valuable source of ethical content. In thinking about themselves, works of art contemplate the nature of the relationship between language and reality, a relationship which has crucial implications for ethics and praxis in the real world. Chapter One, “The Idea of the Impetus,” works with the early poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale in order to explore how the two poets conceptualize the relationship between poetry and the “what” it seeks to communicate—which I call the impetus. I also examine how each poet re-stages and re-writes Giacomo Leopardi’s classic lyric poem “L’Infinito” as a way to express the structure of inspiration. Ungaretti portrays the impetus as a penetration that enters the poet’s silence and writes itself within subjectivity. Accordingly, there is a concrete relationship between the impetus and its expression. Montale, on the other hand, depicts the impetus as always retreating and inexpressible. Through imagery reminiscent of negative theology, Montale’s early poetry articulates the impetus by means of giving form to what it is not and cannot be. Chapter Two, “Ethics, Identity, and the Republic,” positions Plato’s Republic as a foundational text for addressing ethics and representation in the Western tradition. After foregrounding the issue of identity as an underlying rationale for Plato’s expulsion of certain kinds of mimetic art from the ideal republic, I discuss the 2016 unmasking of the famously anonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante. Crucially, I address the thorny issue of whether and when artists are allowed to tell stories about people who are very different. I argue that acceptance of the artist’s right to anonymity is incompatible with a purely identity-based censorship of art on the basis of cultural appropriation. Chapter Three, “The Ethics of Imagining,” dwells at length on Italo Calvino’s highly expressionistic, metaliterary, and non-mimetic novel Le città invisibili. Despite its apparent distance from artistic engagement and the traditional subject matters of ethics, Calvino’s novel encapsulates and interrogates the most important issues of ethics and representation, which range from the problems of imagining Otherness to the metonymic violence of representation as a communicative structure. A non-violent strategy of representation is an essential feature of the Utopian ambition of Calvino’s text: to create and do no harm is perhaps ideal, but it is also impossible. Ultimately, the final passage of Calvino’s novel recommends a Gramscian model of value creation that involves using bricolage to assemble a system of discernment within the semiotic glut of contemporary existence. Chapter Four, “Do No Harm?” investigates to what extent a primum non nocere principle can or should be adopted as a guideline for the ethics of representation. At least for artists, avoiding harm cannot be treated as the primary goal. The most ethical works of art are those that embrace and recognize their nature as potentially transgressive partisans. The chapter ends by revisiting the relationship between language and power in the linguistic education of Renzo in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi. Through Renzo’s semiotic journey, Manzoni’s novel explores how powerful individuals—those with great economic, physical, cultural capital—can exploit the ambiguity of language in self-serving ways. Rather than challenging these structures, however, Manzoni’s novel concludes with a different lesson for Renzo: carefully chosen reticence can be better than reckless speech. Chapter Five, “Of Hospitality in Paisà,” explores many of the same questions introduced in Chapter Four by adopting Jacques Derrida’s theorization of absolute hospitality as an emblem for nonviolence and postulating Carl Schmitt’s politics of naming as an opposing pragmatic extreme. Using the Derrida-Schmitt pairing as an interpretive key, I analyze two sequences of Paisà—the story of Carmela and Joe from Jersey in Part I and the visit of the three foreign military chaplains to an Italian monastery in Part V—in order to call attention to the inevitable co-presence of friendship and enmity in the hospitality that passed between allies in the World War II era. I conclude by offering a somewhat unsettling interpretation of the film’s ambiguous fifth episode which concludes with a gesture of rejection: the Italian monks refuse to break bread with American visitors of a different religion. Despite the troubling ethical implications of the scene, I argue that the viewer must grant primacy to the semiotics of the scene which unambiguously portray the monks’ action in a positive light. If war demands new alliances, perhaps the post-war period demands a renaissance for rejection and return of older value distinctions. Chapter Six, “On Mixed Compositions,” fixes its eyes on the ethical consequences of portraying history through art—particulary when claims for historical truth are mixed with fiction, fantasy, and other products of the imagination. Using Roma città aperta, especially the film’s treatment of the historically inspired characters Don Pietro and Pina, I ponder the ethical obligations that attach to any true story and examine how works of art position themselves to shoulder or avoid such obligations. I follow with a critique of Manzoni’s essay Del romanzo storico before moving on to an assessment of the creative transgressions inherent in Elsa Morante’s La storia, ostensibly a novel written for those who cannot read and on behalf of those who cannot write. I conclude by taking a look at Morante’s restaging of the language-centered osteria scene from I promessi sposi which places the young idealist Davide Segre in the place of Renzo. If Renzo learns to keep his mouth shut, Davide Segre suffers from the realization that cultural difference can form an uncrossable bridge between a speaker and his audience. Chapter Seven, “In Search of an Ethics,” explores Luigi Pirandello’s ambiguous fascism alongside the Sicilian playwright’s overriding concerns with the relationship between language and power. Although Pirandello too might be said to have abandoned the political sphere in his theater, his Nobel prize-winning ouvre nevertheless frequently explores dynamic questions related to ethics and representation. Specifically, I argue that the Pirandello’s conception of language is animated by the co-presence of lightness and weight. The existential lightness of language—the fact that a given word has no constant intrinsic meaning—is always countered by the great heaviness of meaning within the communally constructed language game of power. Chapter Eight, “The Reticence of Empty Space,” closes my sustained argument about ethics and language with a reading of the language of visual space in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film fable Uccellacci e uccellini. In this film, Pasolini creates a deliberate contrast between the written spaces of the neocapitalist present and the open, unwritten horizon which serves as a figuration for the unknown and unknowable future. Taking place in a time of transition for the Left, Pasolini’s film fable visualizes the future as crucially important but unrepresented and/or unrepresentable. As such, Uccellacci participates in a kind of ethically motivated reticence. The film says less about the future in order to minimize its potential for harm: the blank space of the sky functions as a bulwark against inaccuracy, distortion, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding of the sacred, which in this case is the future itself. (shrink)

The world can be defined by territories and perceptions. Gender, roots and religion are related strongly with borders – or perceived borders – that frame the dynamics contained within and the conflicts at its edges. Wherever the borders are challenged, there are inevitably opposing forces – those which welcome expansion and blurring, and those seeking to re-establish the line that has been crossed. Both these forces operate in my work. Driven by that tension, I look to materials that appear in (...) the “in-between” places found in sonic structures and occurring in societies at large; places where ambiguities are glimpsed, identities come and go, and contradictory impulses – performance, play, task, absurdity – operate simultaneously. What appears is a harmony of noises: misappropriations of gesture and consequence; of dry and wet sounds; low and high technology; rough and subtle at once; regular and irregular rhythmic orbits in tandem; materials at once tangled and estranged; hybrids of human, animal, machine; somewhere between unification and resistance. During my time at Harvard, I have composed sixteen pieces, eight of which I herein present as my portfolio. These pieces represent my musical and artistic research from 2011 until 2017, and consist of various instrumentations and artistic contexts, including choreography for musicians, composition for dancers, sound installations, and sonic costumes. Each of the works examines the elastic interplay between repetition and resistance thereto. Musical instruments, commercial objects, and discarded industrial materials are treated prehistorically. Their range of physical/sonic properties are observed by the application of a variety of forces, causing ever-changing patterns to perpetually emerge and disintegrate. The residual sounds of choreographed objects/performers and the choreography of the sound-making; their contributions toward and disruptions of one another's domains; the performer's movement and the movement of sound – all are allowed fruition as causal co-contributors, exploring themes such as gravity, puppetry, system failures and illusion. (shrink)

My dissertation studies works of art that simultaneously feature literary and visual components, and that were produced in Latin America after 1980. To approach them, I propose the notion of the prosthetic condition: a way of being in contemporaneity that is opposed to traditional ontology—a manner of existence proper to entities that are produced artificially and that generate effects beyond the boundaries of the art world. Like medical prosthesis, entities affected by the prosthetic condition replace something that is missing. They (...) bring something new into existence while, at the same time, accounting for a lack—whether original or subsequent. They are a testament to the will to continue despite adversity and an invitation to admire the impact of creation, craft, and artifice. I develop the notion of the prosthetic in conversation with a number of critical and theoretical debates, both in the humanities and beyond: the visual turn in literary studies, the performativity of language, the expansion of artistic fields and media, the dematerialization of artistic practices, the conceptualization of the human and the post-human in contemporaneity, the role of spectatorship as a creative activity, and the role of artistic practices in building communities that account for the different ways in which proximity is experienced today. This notion is particularly helpful when approaching contemporary artistic productions that are resistant to fixed categorizations, or cases when a work of art is several things at once – including, also, non-art. Prosthetic entities underscore art’s ability to create and modify the world, and affect what communities experience as real. They remind us that both fiction and reality are malleable, and that one is often employed as a tool to alter and invent the other. The prosthetic condition is a tool to interpret the creative power available to humans in contemporaneity, as it is experienced both inside and outside art. The dissertation is divided into two parts and three chapters. Part A comprises the first chapter and is devoted to prosthetic objects, examined through the practices of Mario Bellatin and CADA. Part B explores the notion of prosthetic beings: in the second chapter I return to Bellatin’s work to discuss the existence of a prosthetic self, and in the third chapter I study the possible existence of prosthetic others, by looking into the work of Lucas Ospina and Simón Hosie. (shrink)

The mention of “self-control” calls up certain stock images: Saint Augustine struggling to renounce carnal pleasures; dispassionate Mr. Spock of Star Trek; the dieter faced with tempting desserts. In these stock images reason is almost always assigned the power and authority to govern passions, desires, and appetites. But what if the passions were given the power to rule—what if, instead of sovereign reason, there were sovereign sentiments? My dissertation examines three sentimentalist conceptions of self-control: David Hume’s conception of “strength of (...) mind”; Adam Smith’s conception of “self-command”; and Jane Austen’s examination of these conceptions. Hume divests reason of motivational power, and with this new moral psychology comes a new conception of self-control. Humean strength of mind is indirect, artificial, and social—a regulatory system that humans cannot develop until societal systems of government and regulations have been instituted. Smith accepts Hume’s anti-rationalist arguments, but he emphasizes that only certain sentiments are fit to rule. And he argues that self-control develops without the sophisticated external conditions posited by Hume. Smithian self-command is the capacity to modify one’s feelings in accordance with a regulative ideal: the sentiments of an imagined impartial spectator. Austen responds to these conceptions, illustrating and complicating them. Sense and Sensibility explores the difficulties of discerning the feelings of others, and Persuasion dramatizes the difficulties of distinguishing strength of mind in another, offering sets of characters for the reader’s scrutiny, each with a competing claim to strength of mind. Taken together, Austen’s novels offer a fuller and more delicately shaded depiction of the sort of self-control that Hume and Smith imagine in their philosophical works. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the role of experts in democracies, with a focus on issues that involve the translation and use of science in political decisions. Conventional accounts of the relationship between expertise and politics have assumed the validity of a Weberian division of labor, in which experts provide a neutral assessment of the facts, while citizens and their representatives supply the values necessary for political judgment. I challenge this model on the grounds that it presupposes an outdated view of scientific (...) inquiry as a value-free process, and develop a new normative theory for the use of expertise in politics that builds on a wide range of recent work in the philosophy of science that shows how the values, assumptions and purposes of experts shape the production of scientific knowledge. My main argument is that the role of values in science makes it problematic to leave the determination of the science entirely to scientists in policy decisions. I argue on both epistemic and democratic grounds that scientific claims must be submitted to critical democratic scrutiny to prevent democratic policy from being guided by the unexamined judgments of experts on scientific issues such as climate change, biotechnology, obesity, nuclear weapons and environmental safety. The basic argument is simple, but demonstrating its plausibility requires addressing three important challenges, which correspond to the three parts of the project. The first challenge is to trace the theoretical link from a particular philosophy of scientific knowledge and uncertainty to the necessity of particular forms of democratic contestation, and to provide an account of what democratic scrutiny could accomplish on scientific issues. The second challenge is to show how democratic debate on science should be structured in order to realize the epistemic and democratic goals outlined in the first part. I develop an institutional proposal for publicly-monitored, adversarial science courts with citizen juries, designed to overcome the difficulties of deliberation between those who have asymmetric knowledge and authority, and the difficulties of democratic participation and accountability on complex issues in a public sphere that is often highly distortive. The first two parts take the science as given and focus on its use in political decision-making. But the agenda for political debate on science is largely determined by earlier decisions about which research should be pursued and how, typically made at the funding stage. In the third part, I turn to institutions of public funding for science, and develop a theory of the proper forms of democratic input into science funding to enhance the possibilities for the democratic use of expertise at the decision stage. (shrink)

This study reclaims the investigation undertaken by Xuanzang 玄奘, the translator and peripatetic scholar-monk of the Tang Dynasty, and his translation team, into the nature of dying. It conforms to the chronology of the translation and exegesis of the Buddhist texts, including the ancient Āgamas, the recorded discourses of the Buddha, the Mahāvibhāṣa, the Great Abhidharma Commentary, and the foundational works of the subsequent Abhidharma and Yogācāra scholars, undertaken by Xuanzang, and his coterie of scholars and translators, from 645 to (...) 660 C.E. In his comprehensive analyses and translations of the Indic texts on dying, and in his compilation, Demonstration of Consciousness-only, Xuanzang examines the Buddhist teachings on no-self, karma, and reincarnation. In his analysis of the scriptures, he attempts to reconcile the core commitments to the Buddhist doctrines of karma and reincarnation with the tenet of no-self. With the Buddhist theory of the indriyas, attested in the ancient Āgamas, Xuanzang determines that no enduring or permanent self is lost in dying. The corpus of Abhidharma and Yogācāra Buddhist texts translated by Xuanzang and his coterie describes how, by cultivating the skillful indriyas, the spiritual faculties of sentient life, the karma of a sentient being can be improved, as well as the quality of dying and the afterlife. This study uses a source criticism research methodology to investigate the contributions made by Xuanzang on the subject of dying without a self. It finds that within their exegeses and translations of the Abhidharma and Yogācāra texts, Xuanzang and his collaborators, restore the Buddhist tenets of no-self, karma, and reincarnation, and provide the doctrinal basis for deathbed rituals that are practiced across East Asia today. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to recover two key insights that have animated the so-called “non-cognitivist” tradition in ethics – insights that have been continually distorted and obscured through attempts to express them in a theoretical framework that cannot accommodate them. The two key insights are, first, that ethical thinking is fundamentally practical in a way that rules out a substantially representationalist account of such thinking, and, second, that purely ontological questions about the nature and existence of certain sorts of entities are (...) irrelevant to concerns about the objectivity of ethics. When properly understood, these ideas point toward a distinctive kind of metaethical view that I call ‘practical cognitivism’. This view understands ethical practice as the product of a distinctively practical kind of cognition, which we engage in by considering, adopting, rejecting, and carrying out practical commitments. Understanding ethical practice in this way allows us to place ethics in the natural world without distorting or undermining it, and it sheds light on a variety of phenomena that are of central importance to moral philosophy, such as normative guidance, akrasia, and the place of the emotions in ethical life. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why experiences—perceptions, sensations, emotions, and moods—are brain states. My dissertation is motivated by the thought that our current understanding of the hard problem is flawed, and one of the aims of my dissertation is to address this flaw. The other aim is to lay a foundation for a monistic view of the mind-brain relation that is distinct from physicalism. Most philosophers assume that there is only one hard problem since the (...) hard problem is the problem of explaining why there is something it is like to be in a brain state. In “Puzzles of Pain”, I argue that some experiences, e.g., pains, are such that, when we have them, we feel a certain way, while other experiences, e.g., color experiences, are such that, when we have them, something seems a certain way. This suggests that there are two hard problems, one associated with each type of experience. These problems are the subjects of my other papers. In “Knowing What Pain Is”, I argue that the hard problem for pain is reconciling our awareness and knowledge of pain with pain being a brain state. I argue that a reconciliation can’t be achieved since what we learn about pain via our awareness is that it is sui generis. In “Does Transparency Solve the Mind-Body Problem?”, I argue that the hard problem for color experience is explaining why a brain state does a certain thing, viz., make us aware of color. By examining how neuroscientists explain why brain states perform functions, I argue that the hard problem for color experience can’t be solved since a physical mechanism showing how a brain state makes us aware of color can’t be specified. Implicit in these negative conclusions is a positive view that combines the monism of physicalism with the phenomenality of dualism. The roots for such a view can be found in Russell and Eddington, and it holds promise as a worthy alternative to the usual options of physicalism and dualism. (shrink)

"Transparency" is the constant refrain of democratic politics, a promised aid to accountability and integrity in public life. Secrecy is stigmatized as a work of corruption, tolerable by a compromise of democratic principles. My dissertation challenges both ideas. It argues that secrecy and transparency are best understood as complementary, not contradictory, practices. And it develops a normative account of liberal democratic politics in which duties of transparency coexist with permissions to act behind closed doors. The project begins with some history. (...) I show that the language of transparency gained currency only in the last quarter century, and explain how its proximate sources promote three dubious assumptions—that disclosure should in principle be maximized, that it prevents misrule more or less automatically, and that its value is either instrumental, or rooted in a reductive notion of democracy as the rule of popular opinion. Against these assumptions, I sketch an alternative account of liberal democracy centered on the logics of representation, liberty, and equality. These three "logics of self-government" give rise to duties of transparency binding on public and private actors alike. Such obligations have bite, I argue, but they are not all-encompassing. Indeed, the same ideals of representation, liberty, and equality license concealment in a range of important contexts, including deliberation and dissent. Having made this case, I go on to explain how secrecy and transparency can form a "democratic dyad," deepening rather than undermining the project of self-rule. Lastly, I address the limits of conventional transparency practices. Taken alone, disclosure is subject to a range of pitfalls, often failing to produce the results promised in transparency’s name. While my non-instrumental case for openness is not destabilized by this analysis, it does suggest that mandating disclosure is rarely enough. I therefore propose a series of adversarial practices to facilitate the checking of unjustifiable secrecy, and highlight the critical role of interpretation in efforts to make power intelligible. In the end, my dissertation offers a novel defense of secrecy and transparency that highlights rather than minimizes the hard work of political engagement. (shrink)

This dissertation shows how three Russian authors estranged and challenged the notion of human freedom as self-determination—the idea that meaningful self-authorship is possible in view of the finitude that every human being embodies under different aspects of his existence, such as the individual and collective awareness of the inevitability of death, as well as the narrative inclusion of any existential project within multiple contexts of history, culture, and language, all of which are always given already. At first glance to be (...) free is to transcend these multiple limits. But this transcendence can only be absolute if it sees infinity as a creative modification of meaning, whose foundational limits are eradicable. Freedom as absolute transcendence has to be fundamentally suspicious of all totalizing claims, especially those stressing their productive inclusion of unfinalizability as their ultimate source of legitimation. This fundamental suspicion is the aegis under which Leo Tolstoy, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Andrei Platonov approach the legacy of creative transcendence bequeathed by European modernity. The two theoretical accounts of human freedom this dissertation uses are G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Chapter I explores Leo Tolstoy’s response to the cultural legacy of European modernity and its absolutization of the individual project on the example of his novella the Death of Ivan Ilyich, whose narrative structure provides a key to its philosophical argument, namely that the privatization of God via secular self-authorship is metaphysically unwarranted. Chapter II is a comparative reading of Velimir Khlebnikov’s Zangezi and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Khlebnikov polemically estranges Hegel’s account, positing the triumph of the poetic word as a historical standpoint of the human triumph over death, evident in the interplanetary brotherhood of artists for whom cultural, political, historical and economical boundaries become only a means to provisionally define multiple sites of future creation. Chapter III examines the philosophical significance of the formal and thematic peculiarity of Andrei Platonov’s prose in the Foundation Pit. Platonov’s unique philosophical vision is in his understanding of Soviet dialectics as half philosophical theogony and half Christological ontology. (shrink)

It is increasingly clear that schools alone cannot address all of the factors needed to close the opportunity gap between low-income and underprivileged students and their middle-class and more affluent peers. For one thing, the school day and school year are simply too short to adequately address the factors at play. Moreover, student needs are multifaceted, and a multidisciplinary approach is required to adequately meet them. Thus cross-sectional collaboration is needed, particularly in addressing how learning can be extended beyond the (...) school day and school year, and into the early childhood years. This capstone details my efforts to bring a collective impact approach to out of school time programming in Somerville, Massachusetts, where I spent a year working for the superintendent of schools and in conjunction with a variety of school, city, and civic leaders toward a shared goal of expanding access to and advancing equity through extended learning that meets the needs of all students and families. I argue that Somerville is the right place at the right time for this type of effort due to its progressive and diverse citizenry, innovative and committed leadership, and broad base of political will for expanding out of school time due to the affordability crisis being experienced across economic strata in the city. Through a new Community Cabinet of local leaders, a taskforce to organize providers and connect them to government officials, a new education foundation to support the efforts financially, and a community visioning process to co-commission and co-design long-term goals, I created opportunities for collective ideation, planning, and implementation. The results included an increase in quality afterschool programming for low-income and marginalized students. They also revealed systemic challenges, however, including entrenched inequities, cultural disconnects, and competing priorities. The work is now at an important crossroads, and political will and courage is necessary to deepen reforms and to cultivate meaningful leadership among diverse community stakeholders. Done well, this effort has the potential to extend the ideals of inclusive, participatory democracy at the municipal level. I argue that this promising model shows the power that collective impact can have when it is intentionally purposed toward a project for which no one institution or group can initiate, implement, or sustain the work that is necessary for success. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the syncretic ideas of Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and his angelology in order to interpret the process of spiritual ascension that he prescribed in his Oration. This process drew from philosophic and western wisdom traditions but primarily involved the emulation of angels. Central to Pico’s spiritual system was a philosophical analysis of specific characteristics of angelic orders and their hierarchy. Pico developed his own unique arrangement of traditional Jewish and Christian angelic orders to support (...) his anthropology. He argued that humans have the potential to not only walk among the angels, but, in fact, fully to unite with the divine without human mediation even before death. Inextricably intertwined with Pico’s angelology was the biblical story of Jacob’s ladder and its symbolism, as well as the Jewish Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the ancient tradition from which it originated. Pico’s conception of the Cherubim as the angelic order that could, by example, guide humanity to an individual gnosis, or even theosis, demonstrated his syncretic thinking, combining elements of both tradition and originality. (shrink)

Injustice is a central dimension of the American educational landscape. Students, parents, and educators experience injustice through interactions with discipline policies, standardized curriculum, or high stakes testing, among other things. Yet, as much as those concerned with American schools call attention to injustice, they disagree about what, exactly, is unjust. This dissertation addresses this challenge by developing a novel approach to theorizing about injustice. This project is comprised of five interrelated parts. First, I present a normative case study detailing the (...) conflict surrounding efforts first to close and then re-open Dyett High School in Chicago that functions as a common thread in my analysis throughout this dissertation. Second, building from the work of Judith Shklar, I analyze the theoretical possibilities and limitations of, in Shklar’s terms, taking injustice seriously. Third, I describe a robust methodological approach, which I term an ecological approach, that addresses the limits of extant theorizing about injustice I identify in the previous section. This approach draws on Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecology of human development as an analogue, though it is crafted for normative theory. Fourth, using contemporary disputes over school closure as a guide, I show how attending to claims of injustice through an ecological approach reveals the challenges surrounding the notion of democratic sacrifice, as developed by Danielle Allen, in the context of education reform. Finally, I analyze a dispute between Tommie Shelby and Elizabeth Anderson regarding racial segregation to demonstrate the value of an ecological approach beyond the normative analysis of instances of injustice. I show how an ecological approach enables theorists to name and address limits in traditional approaches to nonideal theory. Taken together, this account ultimately clarifies the importance of attending to injustice in education policy and theory. It also provides new language to describe injustice to theorists, policymakers, students, and educators alike. (shrink)

My dissertation is in three parts. In “Evidentialism and Belief Polarization,” I consider the epistemic import of a belief revision process known as belief polarization, in which exposure to a mixed batch of evidence reliably causes people to increase confidence in whatever their antecedent belief was. I argue against Tom Kelly's claim that the beliefs that result from this process are justified on evidentialist grounds, and I take stock of what the phenomenon can teach us about evidentialism as a theory (...) of justification. In “Access Is Not Necessary for Justification,” I focus on a debate between mentalism and accessibilism, as internalist theories of epistemic justification. I argue against the received view that mentalism, as distinct from accessibilism, is not worth defending. In “Epistemic Oppression and Ameliorative Epistemology,” I offer an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic oppression. It occurs when members of a social group are subject to a systematic and unfair disadvantage within a social epistemic structure, resulting from the operation of a capacity to control exercises of their epistemic agency, thus systematically and unfairly limiting their epistemic flourishing. I argue that the concept of epistemic oppression helps us to identify and understand the kind of wrong that happens in these cases where an agent's capacity for epistemic flourishing is unfairly impeded. (shrink)

My thesis offers an account of the phenomenon of bodily alienation. Bodily alienation marks the failure to realize oneself in one’s bodily activities. I argue that realizing oneself in one’s bodily activities requires the pursuit of bodily activities for their own sake—not for the appearance they produce, and the ability to deal skillfully with one’s environment. I characterize bodily alienation by examining three cases concerning gender and race: the tendency, inflected by gender norms, to identify with certain fetishized body parts (...) and to modify one’s body accordingly, the physical incapacitation that the gaze of a member of a dominant group can provoke in a member of an oppressed group, and the personal transformations that members of non-oppressed groups achieve when they reform the bodily habits that alienate members of oppressed groups. I vindicate the use of the concept of bodily alienation for ontologies of the body that aim to ground social criticism. I explain that the concept of bodily alienation can accomplish this task because it is descriptive and normative. Applying this concept both describes someone’s relation to her body and judges that relation as defective. Describing social practices as alienating entails that things are not as they should be. And that raises the question of how they should be changed. My use of the concept of bodily alienation for a critical project concerning gender, race, and the body sets this project apart from other forms of social critique, such as social constructionism. Social constructionists typically make descriptive claims about the relative naturalness of a state of affairs and then make the case for changing it. For example, feminist social constructionist critiques move from the claim that gender differences are not merely a matter of biology and can be reformed, to arguments about why they should be reformed. My account avoids this two-step argumentative strategy. The concept of bodily alienation simultaneously uncovers and evaluates phenomena, while tying them to a conception of human flourishing as embodied. (shrink)

For Mill, the Art of Life requires one to find the appropriate quasi-Platonic balance between Morality, Nobility, and Prudence. In consequence, his Art of Life could fail in any of three ways, corresponding to the assignment of undue scope to any one department at the expense of the remainder. This thesis uses analytical methods, including de dicto and de re interpretation, to unlock the fundamental axiological and existential premises which give Mill’s Art of Life its unity, its creative tensions, and (...) can guide the reconstruction of his system today. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the political argument of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Common interpretations of these texts suggest, variously: that Socrates does not offer much in the way of a political theory; that Socrates does reflect on politics but ultimately rejects political institutions as irrelevant to his ethical concerns; that Socrates arrives at a political theory that either accepts or even celebrates free and democratic political arrangements. Against such interpretations, this dissertation examines Plato’s early work and demonstrates: that Socrates does engage in (...) serious reflection on political institutions and on the question of the best regime; that Socrates recognizes that political institutions are of central importance to his ethical concerns; that Socrates rejects democracy, specifically, or political and cultural freedom, generally, as tending to corrupt the citizenry and lead to misery rather than happiness. In the Socratic dialogues, then, we find Plato intentionally “constructing Kallipolis,” one argument at a time. 1. The first essay examines the Charmides and Socrates’ argument there that it is impossible for an amateur to ever reliably distinguish between experts and non-experts in a knowledge that she does not herself possess. This argument poses a fundamental challenge to democracy, which relies on the ability of amateurs to reliably select good rulers, but the argument does not license such revolutionary action as Socrates’ interlocutors Critias and Charmides would historically undertake. 2. The second essay examines the Gorgias, seeking to understand one of Socrates’ favorite paradoxes: that doing wrong makes the wrongdoer miserable. The essay demonstrates that Socrates’ contention is supported by an argument about appetite and psychological self-harm that anticipates the more elaborate theory of the Republic. This argument, and especially the thought that the wrongdoer’s judgment comes to be seriously distorted by her vice, provides a moral-psychological explanation of the difficulty of reforming a corrupt culture and suggests the value, on Socrates’ account, of non-rational forms of persuasion. 3. The third essay examines the Protagoras and its attack on sophistry. The dialogue argues that any free society will tend toward corruption, on account of the operation of unscrupulous clever speakers who aim to disrupt traditional morality. The solution to this problem is suggested in Socrates sketch of a “philosophical Sparta,” a regime that anticipates the Kallipolis of the Republic in many respects, especially in the strict control of poetry. Considered together, these three essays show that Plato’s Socrates is no democrat. From the beginning he looks toward a radically new kind of politics, an unfree society ruled by a philosophical elite. (shrink)

This dissertation examines a counterintuitive artistic imperative that emerged from the struggles of Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov with an aesthetic problem of Kantian provenance. These two authors are widely considered to be opposed in their vision of art, but I show that their aesthetics in fact converge upon the same goal: to grant the reader a particular kind of freedom. These authors shared the Kantian view that aesthetic enjoyment requires that the reader not be constrained by any interest or (...) concept. This feeling of freedom, they believed, is threatened not only when a reader looks to an artwork to satisfy his appetites, but also when he employs the artwork for a further intellectual or creative purpose of his own. On the latter point, they concluded that too much interpretive license, rather than liberating the reader, actually leaves him trapped within his preexisting conceptual framework. To ensure that their own works grant the freedom necessary for genuine aesthetic pleasure, they developed narrative strategies that restrict how we read the text. (shrink)

The very fact of philosophical values necessitates its concretization in social life. Values are transferred through reflection of philosophical ideas in political sphere. The process proceeds as follows: philosophy → ideology → political life. In the course of politization of values, a part of them, incapable of matching the social structure, vanishes; another part – is privatized; third – specifies limits and dimensions of borders. Politization of philosophical values and their role in political processes differ from political institutions, stages of (...) political processes and their subjects. Based on major principle, the philosophical concept is designed to determine the social-political structure, its standards and regulations. Principles and standards of the social structure contribute to the specification of original value within social life. Philosophy → ideology → politics pilot process of values intensifies, weakens or discontinues depending upon changes within social-political system. Following a certain period of stagnation, the ideology ceases to comply with new conditions; changes are required within the system of values of social life. Thus, the process is of circulatory nature to progress along political life → political philosophy → philosophy lines. Realization of philosophical principles within social life, their sustainable and stable character call for a respective social base, specifically, masses-carriers. Security of political status of values makes it necessary to extend them, step-by-step, to increasingly broader areas. As a result, a value or system of values goes through philosophy → politics → philosophy process. (shrink)

In this dissertation I offer a justification of the claim that the development of those faculties necessary for autonomy should be a primary goal of public education, available to all children. To do this I 1) place autonomy into the framework of Capability Theory, showing why autonomy is essential to a full concept of human freedom, cleaning up some rough edges in the Capability Theory literature in the process; 2) demonstrate how thinking of freedom in terms of Capability Theory elucidates (...) perennial questions and debates in the Philosophy of Education literature concerning autonomy; and 3) dig deeper into what educating for autonomy in terms of Capability Theory might look like through an analysis of rigor. The questions which will guide my research are as follows: 1. What is "autonomy", and why is it a valuable goal to pursue in education? 2. Why must the state ensure that every child have the opportunity to become autonomous? 3. How can autonomy be developed, through schooling and through life? (shrink)

Is there a direct correlation between the degree of an artist’s participation in ideologically defined discursive practices and the aesthetic value and expressive innovation of her or his work? How does the concept of the implied audience influence an author’s approach to the creative process? How relevant is the author’s own self-projection in her or his works to their aesthetic quality? Examining these and other questions, this dissertation studies the strategies of an artist’s engagement with or disengagement from repressive political (...) systems which are understood here as mechanisms of putting forward demands regarding the artist’s creative output. Questions of late Socialist Realism and its national variants, ideological art, kitsch, mass literature, narodnytstvo, “chimerical” prose, totalitarian culture, shistdesiatnytstvo, and cultural heritage define the theoretical framework of the dissertation. The study discusses the period of the 1970s and 1980s in the Soviet Union, focusing on Ukrainian literature and its dynamics during the Stagnation Era and perestroika. Examples from Russian literature test the argument and provide opportunities for comparative analysis. Within Ukrainian literature of the 1970s and 1980s, the dissertation examines the prose works of Valerii Shevchuk and Volodymyr Drozd and poetry of Petro Midianka and Oleh Lysheha. Within Russian literature, the study discusses Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s prose works and Elena Shvarts’s poetry. The authors and their works illustrate the range of possible attitudes towards participation in the system of Soviet cultural production. Close readings of the authors’ representative works demonstrate how complex negotiations with the system are reflected in the aesthetic quality and expressive ability of literary works. The dissertation shows the significance of the author’s concept of the implied audience and her or his own self-projection as an author for the creative process and its outcome. (shrink)

There has been much recent work in philosophy of science on idealization – the way inaccurate representations can be used to understand a target system. My dissertation concerns a particular sort of idealization that is familiar but often overlooked: rational reconstruction. Rational reconstructions are “cleaned-up” – more coherent and accurate – versions of an individual’s or a group’s attitudes. They are the kind of idealized model that facilitates a crucial aim of the interpretive sciences, the understanding of another’s point of (...) view. I provide an account of rational reconstruction and argue that such an account can help us make sense of many intellectual projects in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences. I then argue that this account can also be used to resolve a problem in democratic theory: how deliberative institutions can facilitate understanding and discursive engagement with “inchoate” points of view. A theory of rational reconstruction thus elucidates an important way that the humanities and interpretive social sciences can be politically significant. (shrink)

Kant’s Science of the Moral World and Moral ObjectivityCritics of Kant's moral philosophy often object that it cannot account for moral requirements that are both genuinely objective and contentful. Notwithstanding the long history of this dispute, Kantians have been unable to put these objections to rest. I argue that we can answer these objections and fully understand Kantian moral objectivity only if we consider Kant’s moral philosophy in light of his methodological and architectonic concerns. My dissertation takes up this task (...) by providing a new account of Kant’s conception of moral theory as a philosophical science: Kant’s moral philosophy, I argue, appropriates the central features of the then revolutionary method of Newtonian natural science for the investigation of practical cognition. Just as Newtonian science begins with a priori principles and then gradually "comes down to" particular concrete physics, so too Kantian moral philosophy begins with general a priori moral principles that then gradually translate into a system of particular requirements. The objectivity of the content of our practical thought develops as the background conditions of moral deliberation become progressively more inter-subjectively justifiable. This progress is possible only through co-deliberation and collective action demanded by the duty to make morality fully efficacious in our shared social world, that is, the duty to promote the highest good. My account highlights the attractiveness of Kant’s conception of the relationship between a priori and empirical aspects of practical thought, between theory and practice, and enables its systematic defense against objections by later German Idealists, particularly by Hegel. I argue that Hegel’s polemic against Kant's account of morality is fundamentally a disagreement about the nature of philosophical science and its method, and adjudicating between their views requires adjudicating the methodological dispute itself. I offer a systematic assessment of the methodological grounds of Hegel’s approach and of his critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. I argue that Hegel’s approach does not, on the whole, present a viable alternative to Kant’s moral theory and Hegel’s challenge can be met, but only by appealing to developmental or genetic aspects of Kant’s conception of moral objectivity grounded in his views on the proper method and form of a philosophical science. I show that these aspects of Kant’s thought, generally overlooked by commentators and Kantian theorists, are indispensable to his moral theory and provide a basis for a fruitful engagement with contemporary issues in moral philosophy, such as questions about the nature and role of imperfect duties. (shrink)

In this dissertation I trace the formation of citizens of the information age by comparing visions and practices to make children and the general public computer literate or cultured in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. Computer literacy and computer culture programs in these three countries began in the early 1970s as efforts to adapt people to life in the information society as it was envisioned by scholars, thinkers, and practitioners in each cultural and sociopolitical context. The dissertation (...) focuses on the ideas and influence of three individuals who played formative roles in propelling computer education initiatives in each country: Seymour Papert in the United States, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in France, and Andrei Ershov in the Soviet Union. According to these pioneers, to become computer literate or computer cultured meant more than developing computer skills or learning how to passively use the personal computer. Each envisioned a distinctive way of incorporating the machine into the individual human’s ways of thinking and being—as a cognitive enhancement in the United States, as a culture in France, and as a partner in the Soviet Union. The resulting human-computer hybrids all demanded what I call a playful relationship to the personal computer, that is, a domain of free and unstructured, exploratory creativity. I trace the realization of these human-computer hybrids from their origins in the visions of a few pioneers to their embedding in particular hardware, software, and educational curricula, through to their development in localized experiments with children and communities, and finally to their implementation at the scale of the nation. In that process of extension, pioneering visions bumped up against powerful sociotechnical imaginaries of the nation state in each country, and I show how, as a result of that clash, in each national case the visions of the pioneers failed to be fully realized. In conclusion, I suggest ways in which the twentieth-century imaginaries of the computer literate citizen extend beyond their points of origin and connect to aspects of the contemporary constitutions of humans in the computerized world. (shrink)

Do biological species have essences? The debate over this question in philosophy of biology exhibits fundamental confusion both between and within authors. In What to Salvage from the Species Essentialism Debate, I argue that the best way forward is to drop the question and its terms in order to make progress on two issues: how to individuate species taxa; and how to make sense of changes in explanatory frameworks across the Darwinian historical divide. I further argue that a primary motivation (...) for anti-essentialism, biological variation, matters differently to each project. Anti-essentialism in the philosophy of biology has inspired influential rejections of the idea that there is such a thing as human nature. In More Bark than Bite, I show that the arguments are significantly weaker than supposed. Moreover, none of the weighty consequences thought to follow from any genuine sense in which there is no human nature, actually do follow. The evolution-based denial of human nature has little to contribute to inquiries into the human condition, both philosophical and scientific. Decisions about whether to undergo experiences that could change the very preference-base on which the choice is made are “transformative”. L. A. Paul argues that transformative decisions present a problem for standard decision theory when approached in a way that leans on evaluations of the experiential consequences of the choices. Her solution proposes that we approach such decisions by asking ourselves how much we value the kind of discovery involved in transformative experience. In Shifting Attention on Transformative Choice, I present two problems for her solution and offer an alternative. Transformative decisions may be rationally approached by asking ourselves how much we judge the activities on the other side of transformation to be worthwhile. This proposal helps make better sense of our relationship to experiential consequences of transformation, which is more flexible than Paul acknowledges. (shrink)

This dissertation examines and compares the epistemologies of two of the most popular West African intellectual traditions: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing theories native to the traditions themselves and contemporary oral and textual sources, I examine how these traditions answer the questions: What is knowledge? How is it acquired? And How is it verified? Or more simply, “What do you know?,” “How did you come to know it?,” and “How do you know that you know?” After analyzing each tradition separately, (...) and on its own terms, I compare them to each other and to certain contemporary, Western theories. Despite having relatively limited historical contact, I conclude that the epistemologies of both traditions are based on forms of self-knowledge in which the knowing subject and known object are one. As a result, ritual practices that transform the knowing subject are key to cultivating these modes of knowledge. Therefore I argue that like the philosophical traditions of Greek antiquity, the intellectual or philosophical dimensions of Tijani Sufism and Ifa must be understood and should be studied as a part of a larger project of ritual self-transformation designed to cultivate an ideal mode of being, or way of life, which is also an ideal mode of knowing. I further assert that both traditions offer distinct and compelling perspectives on, and approaches to, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, psychology, and ritual practice, which I suggest and begin to develop through comparison. (shrink)

A meaningful life involves loving people and valuing things. We typically love our spouses, parents, children, siblings, and friends, and value our projects, activities, causes, and ideals. In virtue of such attachments, a meaningful life is also susceptible to regret of a distinctively personal kind. Our regrets about the misfortunes and harms that befall the people we love and the things we value reflect the extent to which we are implicated in the fate of those people and things, the extent, (...) that is, to which our attachments determine who we are. What are the reasons to which we respond in loving a particular person or valuing a particular thing, and how do these reasons explain personal regret as well as our conception of who we are? This is the question this dissertation aims to address. The primary thesis of the first chapter is that we have reasons to love particular individuals as such. The primary thesis of the second chapter is that different individuals rationally value different objects in different ways, while one and the same object can be rationally valued very much by some and not at all by others. The primary thesis of the third chapter is that our present attachments give us reason to regret or affirm the past. All three chapters make use of the distinction between reasons of attachment and reasons for attachment. Reasons of attachment are the reasons a person takes him- or herself to have with regard to the individual or object he or she loves or values, and reasons for attachment justify or warrant a person’s attachments as well as enable the person’s reasons of attachment. For example, the fact that a person is kind might be a reason for being his or her friend, but the fact that the person is free this afternoon might be a reason of friendship to spend this afternoon with him or her. Alternatively, the fact that Ness-Ziona is my hometown may be a reason for valuing it, but the fact that the orchards of my childhood have been replaced by suburban neighborhoods is a reason of valuing to lament the change Ness-Ziona has undergone. In addition to the three, positive theses, all three chapters discuss ways in which our reasons for and against attachment might clash with our reasons of attachment with regard to a particular person or object. While reasons for attachment and reasons of attachment often complement each other, they might also pull in opposite directions. When we have most reason to let go of the person we love, of the place that is our home, or of the vocation we cherish, and letting go means failing or abandoning this person, place, or vocation, then the two kinds of reasons¬ may set us against ourselves, as it were. Thus, this dissertation aims to shed light on the rationality of a meaningful life, but it also accounts for inevitable crises of meaning, without which a meaningful life would not be such a tremendous achievement. (shrink)

Variation in practice of medicine is one of the major health policy issues of today. Ultimately, it is related to physicians' decision making. Similar patients with similar likelihood of having disease are often managed by different doctors differently: some doctors may elect to observe the patient, others decide to act based on diagnostic testing and yet others may elect to treat without testing. We explain these differences in practice by differences in disease probability thresholds at which physicians decide to act: (...) contextual social and clinical factors and emotions such as regret affect the threshold by influencing the way doctors integrate objective data related to treatment and testing. However, depending on a theoretical construct each of the physician's behaviour can be considered rational. In fact, we showed that the current regulatory policies lead to predictably low thresholds for most decisions in contemporary practice. As a result, we may expect continuing motivation for overuse of treatment and diagnostic tests. We argue that rationality should take into account both formal principles of rationality and human intuitions about good decisions along the lines of Rawls' ‘reflective equilibrium/considered judgment’. In turn, this can help define a threshold model that is empirically testable. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the disappearance of punishment as a justification for interstate war in European political theory, and its rise as an individualized process applicable to what modern-day scholars call “war crimes.” This metamorphosis occurred over the course of roughly a century and a half of debate in natural law theory, initiated by the publication of Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli in 1625. This work touched off two parallel and often closely related debates about the precise scope of natural law (...) in wartime and the relationship of individual subjects to the acts taken by their states or sovereigns. Grotius’s arguments about sovereignty initiated a gradual decline of the notion of collective responsibility for state acts which made the precise content on punitive war and state punishment difficult to define, despite strong theoretical hurdles presented by social contract theories of the state which stressed the ways in which the sovereign’s judgment stood in for—and thus could be interpreted as—the subject’s judgment. While this undermined the prospects for collective punishment through war, it was not until the late 17th and early 18th centuries that scholars began to argue that individualized punishment of enemies who violated certain standards of conduct could be a legitimate feature of war, based on a new conception of natural law which stressed the priority of obligations over rights. The culmination of the tradition came in the work of Emer Vattel, whose Droit de Gens preserved punishment as a potential just cause of war but effectively emptied the category of its content, while fully embracing arguments about personalized punishment for offenses which violated the laws of war. (shrink)

Aristotle thinks all our knowledge comes from perception. Yet he doesn't say much about the sense in which our knowledge might be based on or derived from the things we perceive. So what exactly does perception contribute to the more advanced cognitive states that make up our intellectual lives, and how should we understand the nature of its contribution? I argue that perception contributes to these more advanced states by putting us in touch with particular things in a way that's (...) responsive to the universals governing their behavior: perceptible particulars possess certain features because they instantiate certain universals, and perception allows us to discriminate these features and experience them as action-guiding aspects of our environment. So for instance, a patient might exhibit feverish features because she instantiates malarial disease, and a doctor might perceive these feverish features and experience them as soliciting some course of action---as soliciting that the patient be leeched, say. I explain how perception, so understood, can serve as a basis for the development of a perceptually driven form of practical knowledge ; roughly, the form of knowledge possessed by a doctor who knows how to cure a range of patients but could not explain why or how her treatments work. I then explain how such practical knowledge can itself serve as a basis for the theoretically sophisticated grasp of universals Aristotle takes as his cognitive ideal. (shrink)

This work explores how writers of the late Roman Republic use the concept of nature rhetorically, in order to talk about and either reinforce or challenge social inequality. Comparisons between humans and animals receive special attention, since writers of that time often equate social status with natural status by assimilating certain classes of person to certain classes of animal. It is the aim of this study to clarify the ideology which supported the conflation of natural and social hierarchy, by explicating (...) the role that nature was thought to play in creating and maintaining the inequality both between man and man, and between man and animal. In investigating this issue, this study also addresses the question of whether the Romans took a teleological view of human society, as they did of nature, and ultimately concludes that they did not. It proposes, rather, that the conceptual mechanism which naturalized social inequality, and which drove the assimilation of human to animal, was the belief that there is one, natural measure of worth and status for all creatures: utility to the human community. Chapter 1 identifies some pertinent beliefs, commonly found in Republican texts, about nature, animals, humans, and the relationship of all three to each other. Chapter 2 considers whether these beliefs have a philosophical provenance, by discussing Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery and Stoic views on the institution of slavery, and their possible relation to the ideas expressed in Roman sources. Chapter 3 returns to Republican texts, including popular oratory, and examines comparisons between domestic animals and humans in the treatment of slavery and wage-earning. Chapter 4 examines comparisons between wild animals and humans in discussions about violence and primitive peoples, and in political invective. (shrink)

This thesis examines the philosophy of language of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezritch, one of the most influential and creative early Hasidic masters, and the teacher whose students effectively created the Hasidic movement. I argue that Dov Baer offers an innovative approach to the role of language in religious life and its relationship to the inner workings of the human psyche. In contrast to scholars who emphasize aspects of Dov Baer’s thought that idealize silence, my research demonstrates that he embraced (...) words as a divine gift, even describing the faculty of speech as an element of God imbued within humanity. Dov Baer does refer to a realm of creativity and inspiration that lies beyond words. It is into this region that the mystic journeys in his contemplative prayer, tracing spoken words back to their roots in the mind, and then the ineffable beyond. Yet this realm is restricted by its silence, for flashes of insight have no expression until they are brought into language. Indeed, says Dov Baer, all conscious thought occurs within the framework of words, even before it is spoken aloud. A similar transformation characterizes all acts of divine revelation, including Creation and the giving of the Torah, which originate in a pre-verbal inner divine realm and then spread through the pathways of language. My dissertation is a diachronic study illustrating the ways in which Dov Baer’s sermons creatively interpreted and developed conceptions of language in rabbinic, philosophical and kabbalistic literature, but devotes careful attention to his social and historical context as well. This project models a novel approach to the study of mystical texts that interfaces with contemporary issues like the study of language and epistemology, as well as broader methodological questions of the relationship between orality, authorship, and textuality. Dov Baer did not transcribe any of his own sermons, and all homilies attributed to him were recorded in writing by his disciples. Instead of attempting to reconstruct the historical sermons that have been forever lost, my dissertation draws upon the full spectrum of his teachings as they appear in printed books, manuscripts, and quotations by students in the decades after his death. The task is not to determine the veracity of these traditions in order to reconstruct Dov Baer’s “authentic” sermons, since no such Urtext ever existed in written form. I examine his theology of language as presented in early Hasidic literature, acknowledging their diversity while tracking their consistency, seeking to understand the ways in which they shaped emerging Hasidic thought. (shrink)

Why do schools teach mathematics, and why do they teach the mathematics that they do? In this three-part dissertation, I argue that the justifications offered by national education systems are not convincing, and that students are tested on content whose purpose neither they nor their teachers clearly understand. In the first part of the dissertation, I propose a theoretical framework for understanding the content and pedagogy of school mathematics as a set of practices reflecting socio-political values, particularly in relation to (...) labor and citizenship. Beginning with a critical study of history, I trace the origins of modern mathematics education, in the process unearthing common, unexamined assumptions regarding the place and form of mathematics education in contemporary society. In the second part of the dissertation I use the above theoretical framework to re-examine the literature on mathematical word problems. Word problems have interested research because they operate at the intersection between mathematics, education, and labor. I argue that scholarly discussions of word problems have so far adopted unexamined assumptions regarding the role of history, the structure of everyday life, and the relationship between mathematics and other disciplines. Through the lens of political economy I examine these assumptions and offer new categories and explanation for understanding word problems. In the final part of the dissertation, I apply my theoretical framework to practice. Using a dialogical approach, I present a group of undergraduate students and pre-service teachers with artifacts and problems that embody some of the defining tensions of mathematics education. Through twelve weeks of in-depth discussion, fieldwork and exploration, students eventually arrive at a more critical understanding of the social purpose of mathematics and the impact of this purpose on its teaching and learning in various contexts. The results for the students include an expanded vision of the possibilities of mathematics, a radical critique of its place in society, and reports of reduced math anxiety as well as increased curiosity toward mathematics. (shrink)

Apophatic Measures: Toward a Theology of Irreducible Particularity is a work of constructive comparative theology examining select writings of Śaṅkara and Nicholas of Cusa. It argues that, for Śaṅkara and Cusa, apophasis does not culminate in what Michael Sells calls a “semantic event,” but instead in a sensual event. For each, negation removes intellectual distractions, awakening one to a heightened state of sensual attentiveness. For Śaṅkara, this is observed in the embodied encounter wherein a teacher incarnates Vedānta scripture to reveal (...) “This Self is Brahman”. For Cusa, the intimate encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well is paradigmatic of true, attentive sensuality. Employing a heuristic device termed “apophatic measure” in its trifold meanings of method, sensuality, and particularity, this dissertation contributes to contemporary discourses on the ontology of difference, the theo-ethical valuation of diversity, and the singularity of unique bodies. Rather than reducing individuals to ethnic, gendered, or other essentializing measures, persons are regarded as unique disclosures of ultimate reality. Each person is re/cognized as an unprecedented imago Dei or particular manifestation of Ātman-Brahman. Through the pedagogy and performance of apophatic theology, one progressively removes epistemic universals and thereby cultivates a phenomenology of irreducible particularity as a vision of God. Awakened to an attentive sensuality, one re/cognizes this Self, incarnate before one’s very eyes, as an apophatic measure of the immeasurable divine. (shrink)

This dissertation began with two questions. First, how does Michel Foucault understand ethical subject formation as demonstrated in his late work? Second, does the failure of environmental activism in the United States to achieve radical change in individuals' perspectives and practices derive from a faulty understanding of the human subject? I address these questions in two stages. In the body of the dissertation--through close reading in French of the courses at the Collège de France from 1981-1984 and Foucault's late interviews, (...) essays, and occasional lectures--I engage in exegesis of some of the basic terms of his late work on ethics, including conversion, askēsis, parrhēsia, and the self. The key conclusions that I draw from this work are five-fold: the self is a process rather than a substance, and ethical transformation requires questioning the assumptions and values of one's society and conversion to a different regime of truth; conversion occurs through daily training of the mind and body through practice, what Foucault calls "the subjectivation of true discourse," and is a life-long task; this training must be supported both by intimate relationships of friendship and guidance and larger communities of practice; social transformation occurs through personal transformation in the course of demonstrating the truth to others through words and actions, a practice Foucault terms parrhēsia; Foucault imagines freedom both as the radical contingency of reality and the ability of individuals to think and be otherwise. Freedom is not a possession or state, but a practice. In the introduction, I explore the importance of troubling the subject of environmental philosophy and activism, arguing that one key reason that environmental activism is ineffective is the lack of critical reflection on theories of subjectivity. In the conclusion, I bring Foucault into conversation with Bill McKibben, one of the most prominent environmental activists in the United States. Thinking with these two men, I suggest some ways in which a Foucauldian understanding of ethical subject formation might promote better strategies for individual change. (shrink)

I take the New Policies period to be a critical juncture in Chinese history during which, for the first time, the Chinese state initiated systematic intervention into the market. This period witnessed the failure of plans to shape the collective action of bureaucrats and coordinate market actors through a host of organizing mechanisms. I explain why the policy makers in this historical process failed to incorporate and organize the ideas and interests of social actors, political elites and relevant bureaucracies into (...) the state’s authoritative action. I argue that this failure was an outcome of the interaction between the political philosophy of the drafters of the New Policies and their historical context. In particular, it was a result of the incapacity of the drafters’ worldview to correctly explain and resolve unexpected problems in the policy environment, including the influence of political philosophies that were in fundamental conflict with the ideas of Wang Anshi, as well as the reaction of political elites to the New Policies, the rationales and behavioral modes of bureaucrats in financial markets and state monopolies, and unpredictable changes in the marketplace that bedeviled bureaucrats. (shrink)

The value of “personal responsibility” increasingly stands at the center of contemporary discussions about distributive justice and the welfare state. While deep disagreements about who is responsible for which acts and outcomes persist, a wide range of thinkers accepts the normative premise that an individual’s claim to assistance from the collectivity should depend, in part, on whether or not they have acted “responsibly” in the past. Drawing on the recent history of moral and political philosophy, the social sciences, and political (...) rhetoric, I argue that the current consensus around what I call the “responsibility framework” is a new phenomenon. In the postwar era, a conception of responsibility-as-duty emphasized each individual’s obligation to contribute to the community. Today, by contrast, the newer conception of responsibility-as-accountability emphasizes each individual’s obligation, insofar as they are capable of doing so, to provide for their own material needs without outside assistance. This changing conception of responsibility has, in turn, led to a significant—and normatively troubling—transformation of key political institutions. In particular, the welfare state, once conceived as a responsibility-buffering institution that was to provide a social safety net even to those citizens who have made mistakes in their lives, has been transformed into a responsibility-tracking institution, which denies citizens benefits if they are themselves “responsible” for being in a state of need. Among left-wing politicians and egalitarian philosophers, the most common reaction to these normative shortcomings has been to accept the punitive interpretation of responsibility outlined in the responsibility framework, yet insist that the threshold for ascribing responsibility to most individuals is extremely high—thus making responsibility largely inapplicable to everyday moral and political life. However, this “no-responsibility view” ultimately overstates both the philosophical reasons to apply a high bar to ascriptions of responsibility and the political feasibility of convincing people to abstain from holding their fellow citizens responsible for their actions. Instead of dismissing the punitive, pre-institutional account of responsibility altogether, I therefore argue that we should construct a positive, institutional account of responsibility. Drawing on T. M. Scanlon’s work about the significance of choice, I give an account of the important self-regarding, other-regarding and societal reasons why we need to give responsibility a real role in our moral and political world. Building on these reasons, I sketch an institutional account of responsibility that helps to empower people to gain mastery over their own lives, and draw out this account’s implications for the design of political institutions, including the welfare state. (shrink)

The essays in this thesis attempt to answer the most difficult questions that I have faced as a teacher and consultant for school-based data teams. When we report statistics to our fellow educators, what do we say and what do we leave unsaid? What do averages mean when no student is average? Why do we treat our population of students as infinite when we test for statistical significance? I treat these as important philosophical questions. In the first essay, I use (...) Paul Grice’s philosophical analysis of conversational logic to understand how data teams can accidentally mislead with true statistics, and I use Bernard Williams’s philosophical analysis of truthfulness to understand the value, for data teams, of not misleading with statistics. In short, statistical reports can be misleading when they violate the Gricean maxims of conversation. I argue that, for data teams, adhering to the Gricean maxims is an intrinsic value, alongside Williams’s intrinsic values of Sincerity and Accuracy. I conclude with some recommendations for school-based data teams. In the second essay, I build on Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin’s analyses of exemplification to argue that averages are attenuated, moderate, and sometimes fictive exemplars. As such, medians and means lend themselves to scientific objectivity. In the third essay, I use Goodman’s theory of counterfactuals and Carl Hempel’s theory of explanation to articulate why data teams should make statistical inferences to infinite populations that include possible but not actual students. Data teams are generally concerned that their results are explainable by random chance. Random chance, as an explanation, implies lawlike generalizations, which in turn imply counterfactual claims about possible but not actual subjects. By statistically inferring to an infinite population of students, data teams can evaluate those counterfactual claims in order to assess the plausibility of random chance as an explanation for their findings. (shrink)

In this work I address foundational concerns at the interface of educational measurement and social justice. Following John Rawls’s philosophical methods, I build and justify an ethical framework for guiding practices involving educational measurement. This framework demonstrates that educational measurement is critical to insuring, or inhibiting, just educational arrangements. It also clarifies a principled distinction between efficiency-oriented testing and justice-oriented testing. In order to explore the feasibility and utility of this proposed framework, I employ it to analyze several historical case (...) studies that exemplify the ethical issues related to testing: the widespread use of IQ-style testing in schools during the early decades of the 20th century; the founding of the Educational Testing Service; and the recent history of test-based accountability associated with No Child Left Behind. I conclude with a set of speculative design principles and arguments in favor of radically democratic school reforms, which address how the future of testing might be shaped to ensure justice for all. (shrink)

Much of biology, especially evolutionary theory, makes assumptions about the individuality of living things. A population, for example, is made up of individuals. Those individuals sometimes reproduce, creating new individuals. The very use of these concepts requires that living individuals can be distinguished both synchronically and diachronically. There are many examples in nature, however, in which a living system is present, but it is not clear how to understand that system's individuality. Plants, fungi, colonial marine invertebrates, insect colonies, and symbiosis (...) are all classic cases that have puzzled biologists interested in understanding their population structure and evolution. Scientific exploration of these issues has connections with traditional philosophical terrain, particularly the ontology of persistence and the nature of individuality broadly construed. A biologically informed philosophical literature has arisen in recent years, aimed at understanding the nature of biological individuality and its role in biological theorizing. My dissertation makes two kinds of contributions to this current literature. One contribution is theoretical, reframing our thinking about biological individuality. I distinguish between two categories of individuality and argue that they play different roles in theorizing about nature. One important kind of individual is that of the organism, understood as an entity that persists through space and time, takes in and processes resources from the environment, and maintains physiological autonomy. Another important kind of individual is that of the evolutionary individual, understood as an entity that has the capacity to participate in processes of natural selection. Distinguishing between these two types of individuality has theoretical utility, keeping clear the distinctive kinds of biological processes that individuals engage in. The other contribution of my dissertation involves detailed natural historical analysis of three kinds of problem cases. Using the framework articulated earlier in the dissertation, I assess the individuality of symbioses between larger organisms and their microbial associates, mushroom-producing fungi, and the classic case of ant colonies. The combined result of the assessments is a hierarchical pluralism about biological individuality. (shrink)

Descartes and Malebranche often seem to argue that the self is identical to an immaterial thinking substance distinct from the body. But there are also many passages where they insist that the body is part of the self. This means that Descartes and Malebranche have a problem, since they seem to endorse three mutually inconsistent propositions: I am an immaterial thinking thing. Immaterial things don't have bodily parts. I include my body as part of myself. I call this puzzle the (...) self-body problem. It is a problem about understanding how we - the immaterial thinking subjects who engage in the self-reflective project of the Meditations - can incorporate our bodies into ourselves. I argue that Descartes and Malebranche have an elegant solution to this inconsistency. On my interpretation, the Cartesian self is not identical to an immaterial thinking substance. Rather, the Cartesian self is a variably constituted being that has different parts at different times and in different possible situations. Sometimes the self exists with both an immaterial thinking part and a bodily part. Other times it exists with only an immaterial part. The immaterial part is essential to the self, the bodily part is not. When Descartes and Malebranche say that I am immaterial, what they really mean is that I essentially have an immaterial part. But that is consistent with the claim that my body is part of myself. (shrink)

Many of us take for granted that rationality requires that we have our attitudes combined only in certain ways. For example, we are required not to hold inconsistent beliefs or intentions and we are required to intend any means we see as crucial to our ends. But attempts to justify claims like these face two problems. First, it is unclear what unifies the rational domain and determines what is rationally required of us. This is the content problem. Second, as philosophers (...) have been unable to find any general reason for us to have our attitudes combined only in certain ways, it is unclear why, or in what sense, we are required to comply with these putative requirements in the first place. This is the normativity problem. My dissertation offers an account of rationality which solves these problems. I argue that the entire domain of rational requirements can be derived from a single ultimate requirement demanding that we not have sets of intentions and beliefs which cause their own failure. This General Requirement of Structural Rationality explains the unity of the rational domain and directly solves the content problem. But it also solves the normativity problem. I argue that whenever we violate the General Requirement we are engaged in a form of criticizable self-undermining. I propose that this is enough to ground the claim that we ought to comply with the General Requirement's demands. This conclusion can be secured as long as we accept the thesis of normative pluralism, according to which there is more than one fundamentally distinct form of normative 'ought.'. (shrink)

This dissertation provides a defense of the normative intuition known as the Procreation Asymmetry, according to which there is a strong moral reason not to create a life that will foreseeably not be worth living, but there is no moral reason to create a life just because it would foreseeably be worth living. Chapter 1 investigates how to reconcile the Procreation Asymmetry with our intuitions about another recalcitrant problem case in population ethics: Derek Parfit's Non-Identity Problem. I show that what (...) has prevented philosophers from developing a theory that gives a satisfactory account of both these problems is their tacit commitment to a teleological conception of well-being, as something to be `promoted'. Replacing this picture with one according to which our reasons to confer well-being on people are conditional on their existence allows me to do better. It also enables us to understand some of the deep structural parallels between seemingly disparate normative phenomena such as procreating and promising. Chapter 2 attempts to connect my defense of the Procreation Asymmetry to corresponding evaluative claims about the goodness of the outcomes produced by procreative decisions. I propose a view, the `biconditional buck-passing view of outcome betterness', according to which facts about the comparative goodness of outcomes are a function of our reasons for bringing about one outcome rather than another under certain conditions. This enables me to derive an Evaluative Procreation Asymmetry from the corresponding normative claims established in Chapter 1. The biconditional buck-passing view also provides me with a principled basis for challenging a version of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives Principle. This, in turn, permits me to provide a novel solution to another famous problem in population ethics: Parfit's Mere Addition Paradox. Finally, in Chapter 3, I rebut some key objections to the Procreation Asymmetry by showing that upholding it does not commit us to anti-natalism and that it is compatible with a moral concern for the long-term survival of humanity. (shrink)

Progress in understanding mineral evolution, Earth’s changing near-surface mineralogy through time, depends on the availability of detailed information on mineral localities of known ages and geologic settings. A comprehensive database including this information, employing the mindat(dot)org web site as a platform, is now being implemented. This resource will incorporate software to correlate a range of mineral occurrences and properties vs. time, and it will thus facilitate studies of the changing diversity, distribution, associations, and characteristics of individual minerals as well as (...) mineral groups. The Mineral Evolution Database thus holds the prospect of revealing mineralogical records of important geophysical, geochemical, and biological events in Earth history. (shrink)

This thesis is a reflection upon objects of power and their roles in the lives of people through the lens of a single case example: power objects as they appear throughout the narrative, philosophical, and ritual writings of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialist Sog bzlog pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan and his milieu. This study explores their discourse on power objects specifically for what it reveals about how human interactions with certain kinds of objects encourage the flow of power and (...) charisma between them, and what the implications of these person-object transitions were for issues of identity, agency, and authority on the personal, institutional, and state registers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tibet. (shrink)

Tawātur is the concept that if we obtain the same information through a sufficient number of independent channels, we reach certainty about that data. When applied to the transmission of Qur'ān and hadith texts, tawātur can serve as a means by which to assert the truth of a source-text, which in turn has implications for correctness of the religious belief or practice that is conveyed by the text, and hence the orthodoxy of one accepting or rejecting it.

This dissertation has three parts. In "Quantum Entanglement, Bohmian Mechanics, and Humean Supervenience," I defend David Lewis's metaphysical doctrine of Humean supervenience, and traditional metaphysical reductionism more generally, against an alleged holistic threat encapsulated in the non-separability argument from quantum entanglement. I argue that, contrary to popular belief, realism about quantum mechanics is compatible with Humean reductionism.

Over the twentieth century and into the present, theorists of secularization and political theology have explored ways that theological arguments have shaped the social, ethical, economic, and political imaginaries of the modern West. In many of these studies, the doctrine of providence has come under scrutiny alongside related theological debates over of the nature of divine sovereignty, glory, the will, and the significance of immanent life in relation to divine transcendence. While it is often taken for granted that the Calvinist (...) branch of Protestant reform likewise had a decisive impact on the shape of the modern West, there has been no extended treatment of Calvin's writing on providence, or related doctrines, which engages these arguments about secularization. (shrink)

This dissertation treats the diagram as a literary object. It explains how the diagram structured the conditions of possibility of a world-literary modernity as it emerged in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Caught between the competing epistemic regimes of scientific and humanistic knowledge, as well as between the clash of cultures, East and West, the diagram's potential as a scientifically neutral, and thus, "universal" language was deployed and redeployed in complex ways: just as the diagram was used to reveal (...) the fundamental conditions of literary possibility, it was also made into a literary object itself. Thus, as both a hermeneutic tool and an aesthetic object itself, the diagram's place in literature is shown to hinge upon the necessary but ambivalent relationship between the gravitas of literary criticism and the spirit of play in literary art. Beginning with a philosophical and genealogical archaeology of the diagram, the dissertation unfolds by situating various theoretical issues elicited by the placement of the diagram in literature, such as problems of interpretation, cognition, translation, adaptation, and materiality, within an intricate matrix of historical and cultural contexts. Readings likewise draw from a wide range of disciplines, such as continental philosophy, history of science and mathematics, visual studies, as well as from a wide range of languages and literatures, from English, French, and German, to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. (shrink)

During the Progressive Era, literary writers such as Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman engaged with ideas emerging from the newly consolidated educational profession about art's capacity to mediate between individual and social development. These ideas varied widely in their philosophical, pedagogical, and political implications, but all reinforced the authority of professional educators at the expense of democratically elected boards of education. Novels working through these ideas can be usefully theorized as Bildungsromane if the definition of the Bildungsroman (...) is refined to be more sensitive to the wide range of educational philosophies that can inform it, and to the range of attitudes, from critical to worshipful, that it can assume toward these philosophies. This reimagining of the genre opens up the possibility that the Bildungsroman, and the Bildung idea more broadly, can have a more positive political valence than most scholars have acknowledged. In particular, a viable project of aesthetic education can be discerned in the philosophy of John Dewey, although it lacks a clear literary corollary. (shrink)

How do rights relate to moral complaints? What is the relationship between our moral entitlements---the obligations that are owed to us---and the moral complaints that we can make---our claims to have been wronged?

Debates over intellectual property's justifications tend to treat natural rights and utilitarian accounts as competitors, but they should be seen as complements instead. Lockean and Kantian theories of intellectual property highlight the strong interests that intellectual property creators have in profiting from and exercising some degree of control over their work, but neither theory gives sufficient justification for the full assortment of rights that intellectual property owners have under current law. Utilitarian accounts provide an essential supplement to these natural rights (...) theories by focusing on society's interests in the production of useful information and creative expression, but that does not mean intellectual property law should single-mindedly strive only to maximize social welfare. Developing both natural rights-based and utilitarian justifications, this dissertation advances a pluralist account of intellectual property that understands different features of copyright, patent, and trademark law to be serving different normative interests. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the intersection between the culture of knowledge and socio-economic conditions of late Ming and Qing China through the lens of materia medica. I argue that medicine in China during this time developed new characteristics that emphasized the centrality of drugs as objects of pharmacological knowledge, commodities valued by authenticity and efficacy, and embodiment of medical skills and expertise. My inquiry contributes to a deeper understanding of the materiality of healing as a basic condition in early modern societies: (...) on the one hand, textual knowledge about drugs and the substances themselves became increasingly available via the commoditization of texts and goods; on the other hand, anxiety arose out of the unruly nature of potent substances, whose promise to cure remained difficult to grasp in social practice of medicine. (shrink)

Legal analysis is dominated by legal arguments, and the assessment of any legal claim requires the assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of those arguments. The ‘logocratic’ method is a systematic method for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments. More specifically, it is a method designed to help the analyst determine what degree of warrant the premises of an argument provide for its conclusion. Although the method is applicable to any type of argument, this essay focuses on the logocratic (...) framework for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of evidentiary legal arguments, arguments offered in litigation in which evidentiary propositions are proffered to support hypotheses. The focus is on American law, but the logocratic analysis offered here could be adjusted without much trouble to handle arguments about evidence in other systems of litigation. In any legal system that aspires to have a fact-finding process that is sufficiently reliable to meet the requirements of justice, we might fashion an analogue for the Socratic maxim ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’: the unexamined evidentiary argument is not worth believing. The logocratic method seeks to help the evidence analyst pursue that Socratic mission, tailored to the rules and institutions of evidence law. (shrink)

ER22x was offered as a HarvardX course in Spring 2013 on edX, a platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs). It was taught by Professor Michael Sandel. The report was prepared by researchers external to the course team, based on an examination of the courseware, analyses of data collected by the edX platform, and interviews with the course faculty and team members.

The starting point of the dissertation is a special kind of intentional action -- Aristotelian praxis, or, in a more metaphysical register, energeia -- a kind whose agent's intention in acting must be expressible as the deliverance of one's prohairesis , action that is the embodiment of one's conception of eupraxia , and, equivalently, of eudaimonia . It is special, since not all that we intentionally do can be intelligibly expressed as the deliverance of our conceptions of acting well. Recognition (...) of the gaps between action in general and intentional action more specifically, and between intentional action and prohairetic action, sets the stage for a reinterpretation, not only of core aspects of Aristotle's Ethics, but also of central features of Aristotle's political recommendations. The interpretation defended here centers on the claim that, for Aristotle, defective political communities are often marked, not so much by an erroneous conception of human virtue, but by defective forms of action, forms in which agents fail to apply certain concepts to what they do. Importantly, such failures do not hang on the different failure to apply concepts correctly: the failure to act prohairetically need not come to the failure to grasp the correct conception of human virtue or of human happiness. (shrink)

Mexico's innovative health reforms have attracted scholarly attention beyond its own borders, making it a valuable case to study how countries set priorities. This dissertation examines the multifaceted topic of priority setting through a multidisciplinary approach: each of the three papers of this dissertation employs one of three disciplinary perspectives: historical, quantitative or normative. The dual focus on mental health and HIV--two highly stigmatized diseases with almost opposite histories of prioritization--further underscores the social and historical aspects of health priority setting.

This dissertation examines three contemporaneous religious philosophers active in early modern South Asia: Muhibb Allah Ilahabadi , Madhusudana Sarasvati , and the Safavid philosopher, Mir Findiriski . These figures, two Muslim and one Hindu, were each prominent representatives of religious thought as it occurred in one of the three pan-imperial languages of the Mughal Empire: Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian. In this study, I re-trace the trans-regional scholarly networks in which each of the figures participated, and then examine the various ways (...) in which their respective networks overlapped. The Chishti Sufi Muhibb Allah, drawing from the Islamic intellectual tradition of wahdat al-wujud, engaged in "international" networks of Arabic debate on questions of ontology and metaphysics. Madhusudana Sarasvati, meanwhile, writing in the Hindu Advaita-Vedanta tradition, was busy adjudicating competing interpretations of the well-known Sanskrit text, the Yoga-Vasistha. Mir Findiriski also took considerable interest in a shorter version of this same Yoga-Vasistha, composing his own commentary upon a Persian translation of the treatise that had been undertaken at the Mughal imperial court. In this Persian translation of the Yoga-Vasistha alongside Findiriski's commentary, I argue, we encounter a creative synthesis of the intellectual contributions occurring within Muhibb Allah's Arabic milieu, on the one hand, and the competing exegeses of the Yoga-Vasistha circulating in Madhusudana's Sanskrit intellectual circles, on the other. The result is a novel Persian treatise that represents an emerging "sub-discipline" of Persian Indian religious thought, still in the process of formulating its basic disciplinary vocabulary as drawn from these broader Muslim and Hindu traditions. (shrink)

The three papers which make up this dissertation form part of a larger project, which aims to solve the `access problem' for realism about mathematics by providing a clear and plausible example of what a satisfying explanation of human accuracy about objective mathematical facts could look like. They fit into this project as follows.

Part One defends the thesis, first advanced by Aristotle, that the conclusion of practical reasoning is an action, and argues for its philosophical significance. Opposition to the thesis rests on a contestable way of distinguishing between acts and contents of reasoning and on a picture of normative principles as external to the actions that fall under them. The resulting view forces us to choose between the efficacious, world-changing character of practical thought and its subjection to objective rational standards. This is (...) a false choice. Aristotle's own understanding of the thesis points the way to an alternative conception of practical reason on which it is at once a power to effect changes in the world and to get things right. Practical reasoning endows the action performed on its basis with a principle that is not imposed on it from outside: instead, it makes the action what it is. Properly understood in terms of the relevant acts of a rational subject, the thesis is defensible and philosophically attractive. Furthermore, it helps us understand the continuity and discontinuity that exists between the motions of human beings and those of other animals, as Aristotle showed. (shrink)

To many readers, the Victorian novel is synonymous with moral insight and Victorian criticism with moral philistinism. While the novel remains celebrated for its complex treatment of decision-making and sympathy, the evaluative judgments of Victorian critics have been dismissed as thematically reductive and imprecise. However, this study argues that the virtue terms that pervade Victorian discourse--words like "natural," "manly," "lucid," and "sincere"--invest sentence-level stylistic properties with ethical value because they embody aesthetic character. Rather than focus on the novel's action, characters, (...) or themes, these "stylistic virtues" ascribe moral significance to "literariness" itself. (shrink)

Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding is considered by many to be the locus classicus of a number of influential arguments for conventionalism, according to which there are no objective, privileged ways of classifying things in the natural world. In the dissertation I argue that Locke never meant to reject natural kinds. Still, the challenge is to explain how, within a metaphysics that explicitly denies mind-independent essences, we can make sense of a privileged, objective sorting of substances. I argue that we (...) do so by looking to Locke's conception of God as divine architect of created substances. (shrink)