200 years after a nuclear war devastated the world in an alternate, post-World War II timeline, Fallout 3 places the player as an inhabitant of a survival shelter designed to protect humans from nuclear radiation. When the player's father leaves without prior notice, the player does as well, traversing the Capital Wasteland that was once Washington, D.C., in pursuit. While combat is the game's primary emphasis, Fallout 3 has an important feature in its Karma system. Player actions affect status within (...) the game world and how well non-player characters (NPCs) receive the player. With consequences to most every action, the player is able to earn significant in-game rewards. However, evil as well as good deeds can garner positive NPC reactions, though excessive evil or goodness prompts Regulators to exact vigilante justice upon the player or Talon Company Mercs to put down "another holier-than-thou white-knight." As such, Fallout 3 is a video game that offers a provocative perspective on a particular post-apocalyptic scenario, revealing the sustained prevalence of war. Though on a scale more personal than political, more intimate than global, war in Fallout 3 focuses on simple survival and associated moral choices. Because of this, religious concerns as well as gender, ethnic and racial divisions appear as either unimportant or nonexistent. With individual morality and survival at the forefront, Fallout 3 provides perhaps a more honest view of humanity at the end of history. (shrink)

Pedagogy that encourages more play in college-level writing courses is often coupled with an acknowledgment of technology as an increasing influence in students’ lives (Sirc, 2001; Moberly, 2008; Robison, 2008; Shultz Colby & Colby, 2008). Writing scholars’ revisiting and/or revitalization of classical Greek words like kairos and techne is motivated by similar purposes, that is, teaching writing while acknowledging related technical and technological influences (Moeller & McAllister, 2002; Penrod, 2005; Losh, 2009). In light of research in play and the revival (...) of classical rhetorical language for the purposes of composition-rhetoric pedagogy, I desire to bring these two research areas together by arguing for an understanding of techne as play. (shrink)

This commentary is a reflective discussion of how to use simple social media tools in college-level writing courses, and contains research elements such as effective examples of what is attainable and possible when incorporating blogs (e.g., Posterous) and Twitter in the college classroom. In order to do this, it uses reflective writing with a focus on failures/successes in past courses, and also incorporates students' own comments on blogging and Twitter. The chapter's findings include the following: The overall ease of use (...) and relative simplicity of certain social media tools make for low barriers of entry for a majority of students. The mobile accessibility of these online communicative technologies should also be of specific appeal. These characteristics should encourage student participation in ways that content management systems like Blackboard do not. The convenience of and allowance for quick and easy sharing of information via blogging and microblogging can also mean that each is often quicker than email for contacting someone. What makes both better than Blackboard concerns how they, when taken together, sustain class discussion, keeping it alive, present, and continuous. If proper affordances are made in terms of framing and timing, social media can make for successful additions to college-level courses. Simple tools allow and encourage students to document and reflect on their own learning in ways that are meaningful and unique as they are. (shrink)

This dissertation treats the narrative fiction, philosophical essays, and the revistas (cultural/aesthetic/philosophical journals) published and disseminated by the Argentine and Spanish avant-gardes between 1918 and 1936. I argue that the multifaceted relationships formed within this cross-cultural exchange are constituitive of a transatlantic avant-garde assemblage. The key compositors in this assemblage’s constitution are Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jorge Luis Borges, and José Ortega y Gasset. Additionally, the translatlantic revista, Síntesis, is presented as a case study that confirms my hypothesis regarding (...) the transatlantic nature of this specific avant-garde assemblage. Within this assemblage, the avant-garde’s aesthetic expressions and philosophical figurations of the human provide it its unique composition and consistency. As I further submit, avant-garde notions regarding the relationship between the human and the aesthetic can often be genealogically traced to German humanistic and anti-humanistic philosophies, such as those that emerge out of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, and Nietzsche’s general ouevre. A thinker trained in German philosophy, Ortega acts as the primary transatlantic avant-garde figure that rides an alternately transparent and turbid wave of thought and practice revolving around the human. In El tema de nuestro tiempo, La deshumanización del arte, and La rebelión de las masas, Ortega complicates and radicalizes certain humanistic concepts in the name of dehumanized aesthetics, hierarchical order, and reactionary politics. Ortega’s influence in Argentina can be seen in the work of Eduardo Mallea, whose book, Historia de una pasión argentina, recapitulates many of Ortega’s basic theses. Many other vanguardists receive racical ideas from both their avant-garde contemporaries and from the German philosophical tradition, though not all follow Ortega down a path toward conservatism. The Spanish writer, Pedro Salinas, utilizes a dehumanized aesthetic technique in Víspera del gozo, but does so in order to critique Ortega’s limited epistemological approach. Meanwhile, the Argentine novelists, Roberto Arlt and Macedonio Fernández, propose their own radical alternatives in hopes of freeing life from such limited models. Arlt does so in El juguete rabioso, Los siete locos, and Los lanzallamas, while Macedonio does so Adriana Buenos Aires and Museo de la Novela de la Eterna. (shrink)

Different cultures produce different lifestyle patterns. Korea is a country profoundly influenced by its history of Confucianism. Korean families living in the U.S.A. bring with them child-rearing patterns based in the Korean experiences. This dissertation is an explanation of these patterns as they affect Korean children's lives in and outside of school. Korean children have two schools; one at home and one at their American public school. As a result "home" seems to be missing for these children as is time (...) to play because of long hours of study. Korean mothers transform their homes into Korean schools and become their children's primary teachers. Their teaching methods are designed to develop test taking skills such as rapid memorization, speed and accuracy. Little or no time is left for unstructured or creative play. Interviews with five Korean mothers revealed that the mothers carried a double burden; helping their children to adjust to American schools and preparing them to re-adjust to Korean schools. The influence of the Korean college entrance exam forced these mothers and their children to prepare for their return to Korea rather than focus on the children's adjustment to American school. For Korean children in the U.S.A., childhood is directed and predetermined by their mothers' efforts to help them succeed at school. These efforts make it seem as if a program is being inserted into a mechanism. In the process the heart of childhood experience, the importance of play is missing in these children's lives. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings and with suggestions for improving the life of Korean children in the U.S.A. (shrink)

According to a common philosophical view of practical reasons, normative reasons for acting are independent of agents’ desires. Desires are never reason-providing in themselves; instead, they are transparent to the reasons that support having them. With this view goes a picture of practical deliberation that is like science in its objectivity and detachment. But I suggest that there are times when a practical deliberator should not be so detached. Suppose an agent is forced to choose between two paths along which (...) she could direct her life, and that the relevant desire-independent reasons are insufficient for her to choose one over the other. I argue that this kind of deliberative impasse transforms the question before the agent from “what to do” into “who she wants to be” because the situation engages the agent’s concept of herself as the author of her life. If she becomes inclined toward one of her options, with the sense that it represents who she wants to be, she may invoke her authority to choose her path as one who is in charge of actively leading her life. In choosing in this way, the inclination on which the agent acts has become a reason which is “self-creating” in two senses: (a) it is created by an existing self, out of elements that constitute that self; yet (b) it also helps to create and re-constitute the self, for it gives the agent reason to reshape those elements in a particular way, thus reorienting her life. I locate the normativity of self-creating reasons in self-respect. First, unlike mere desires, self-creating reasons are normative because they stem from the cares that give a person her unique identity; as I argue, this demands respect. Second, the agent may choose on the basis of the inclination, even though it outstrips any desire-independent reasons so to choose, because in doing so she acts as the author of her identity—a role which also demands respect. (shrink)

My dissertation explores the foundations of ethics—the question of whether and where practical justification comes to an end. What reason do we have to be moral? Is the fact that something is pleasurable at least a defeasible reason to pursue it, and if so, why? I argue that the only way to answer such questions is to look at what is constitutive of action. Nonnormative facts about the nature of agency can ground the normative authority of reasons for action. Recently, (...) an influential group of externalists about reasons for action have argued that normativity is sui generis and cannot be further explained. Recently, too, many of the most prominent internalists to offer an explanation of normative force have merely assimilated the problem to one about motivational force. I argue that neither position is satisfactory. We need answers to our practical questions, and externalism has none to offer beyond brute intuitions. A purely motivational internalism, on the other hand, seems to fall well short of a normative theory. Appeals to facts about motivation do not answer the question of what we have reason to do; they bypass it in favor of the question of what we are going to do. Fortunately, there is a middle way that combines the best of both views: constitutivism. An account of practical normativity based on action’s constitutive aim can explain both how we are governed or moved by reasons and how those reasons have genuine, objective authority. The constitutive aim of action sets the agenda for practical reasoning, and considerations that engage this aim are the ones that bring such reasoning to a close. They settle the practical question of what to do. But if, as I maintain, the normative question of what I ought to do (or what I have reason to do) seeks considerations that bear on the practical question of what to do, then answers to the latter are ipso facto answers to the former. In this way, nonnormative facts about what closes practical deliberation can ground fully normative facts about what we have reason to do. (shrink)

The current project introduces a general theory and supporting models that offer a plausible explanation and viable mechanism for generating and perpetuating prosocial behavior. The proposed mechanism is preferential detachment and the theory proposed is that agents utilizing preferential detachment will sort themselves into social arrangements such that the agents who contribute a benefit to the members of their group also do better for themselves in the long run. Agents can do this with minimal information about their environment, the other (...) agents, the future, and with minimal cognitive/computational ability. The conclusion is that self-organizing into groups that maintain prosocial behaviors may be simpler and more robust than previously thought. The primary contribution of this research is that a single, simple mechanism operating in different contexts generates the conceptually distinct prosocial behaviors achieved by other models, and in a manner that is more amenable to evolutionary explanations. It also bears importantly on explanations of the evolution of our moral experiences and their connection with prosociality. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of how methodological issues in psychology can have significant implications for philosophical accounts of interpretation, justification, and psychological explanation. In the first chapter, I analyze traditional philosophical accounts of interpretation with an eye to identifying the ways in which philosophers have used rationality as a methodological tool. I argue that these forms of methodological rationalism do not successfully cope with the challenge from the heuristics and biases research program which generally argues that human judgment is (...) irrational. In the second chapter, I trace cognitive psychology's disciplinary trend to study conditions that facilitate rational rather than irrational judgment. This trend suggests we should seek to make rational judgment an object of study rather than a default methodology for the process of studying psychological judgment. I argue that social and moral interests in promoting cognitive health motivate and justify the interest in discovering conditions that promote rational rather than irrational judgment. I call this normative account of applied cognitive psychology ecological rationalism. In the third chapter, I argue that psychology's disciplinary interest in creating valid questionnaires motivates discovering the conditions of successful communication. I discuss the methodological lessons that the Gricean turn in psychological research brings to questionnaire design: in particular, the Gricean turn imposes evidential requirements on psychological research about the conditions of successful versus unsuccessful communication for specific contexts and the conversational norms governing communication in experimental conditions. In the fourth chapter, I argue that some methodological critiques of the heuristics and biases research program have intimate connections to naturalized epistemology: in particular, the ways in which Gerd Gigerenzer thinks cognitive processes should be specified for the sake of explaining human judgment suggest that cognitive psychology and naturalized epistemology are disciplines with shared explanatory goals. I argue that both invoke cognitive processes to explain the psychological transformation of inputs to output-beliefs; and both seek to explain the epistemic status of output-beliefs by reference to the same cognitive process invoked to explain its production. To close, I make a few observations on how the shared explanatory goals between cognitive psychology and naturalized epistemology recasts traditional challenges facing reliabilism. (shrink)

René Descartes’ conception of the human will has important implications for his conception of human beings as rational and moral agents. Specifically, the will plays a significant role in his views on what control we have over our beliefs; what kind of freedom we enjoy; how our emotions affect our actions, and how we can moderate our emotions. I explore these issues in three contexts that arise throughout Descartes’ corpus, from his earliest significant work, Rules for the Direction of the (...) Mind (the Regulae, 1619-1628), to his last published work, The Passions of the Soul (1649). I begin with the question of why Descartes construes judgment as an operation of the will in the Meditations. This is a change in view from the Regulae. I argue that to understand this change, we need to consider his conceptions of error and activity in the Regulae. I trace the development in his philosophical views about error and activity from the Regulae to the Meditations and show that these commitments underpin his mature theory of judgment. I then turn to Descartes’ conception of freedom in the Fourth Meditation. Descartes’ conception of the will, I argue, figures centrally in his conception of freedom. I show that Descartes holds that freedom is compatible with determination and consists in the power of the will to determine itself. I show, further, that Descartes’ later correspondence helps to clarify and unify his characterization of freedom in the Fourth Meditation: freedom is proportional to the ease of self-determination. Lastly, I consider Descartes’ conception of the relationship between the will and the passions of the soul (the passions). I begin by addressing how the passions affect the will, and I argue for a “bifurcated” approach to the function of the passions. This interpretation holds that the passions affect the will differently depending on what kind of volition results—volitions involved in action or volitions involved in judgment. I then discuss several ways in which Descartes conceives of the passions as problematic. I conclude by exploring three means Descartes prescribes for controlling them: habituation, indirect control, and the regulation of desire. (shrink)

The thesis is organized in the following approach. First, we will address some of the main issues for general artificial intelligence. Second, to enhance our understanding of the problems, this article will provide a general overview of two axiological theories presented from philosophy: absolutism and relativism. We will discuss some examples of how these concepts relate to machine learning algorithms. Third, we will argue the thesis statement that classification requires relativism to be useful. The goal of this paper is to (...) show how relativism can be used as a strategy to help solve some of the issues for general artificial intelligence. The concept of relativity can be useful for: (1) axiology, (2) defining things, and (3) memory. Then, the paper will conclude with future and final thoughts on the subject matter. (shrink)

We make judgments about the law—about our legal rights, obligations, and powers—all the time. How should we interpret these judgments, and the practices that give them sense and effect? What are they judgments of—what are legal rights and obligations? Although these judgments and facts play important roles in our day-to-day lives, it’s not entirely clear what they amount to. In this dissertation, I propose that these legal judgments and facts are best interpreted as moral judgments and facts of a certain (...) sort. In effect, then, I suggest that we understand law as morality—as a part or a branch. What could this mean? In short, the animating idea is that living in a political community makes it both possible and necessary to ask new kinds of moral questions. Among other things, it forces us to ask what effects, if any, the actions of political institutions have on what we may expect and demand from one another, and on whether it is fitting or permissible for us to hold one another to those demands by (say) intervening to disrupt certain plans or by imposing fines or punishments after the fact. To treat law as morality is to hold that notions like “legal right” and “legal obligation” enable us to formulate, debate, and answer some of these distinctive moral questions. In the essays that follow, I argue that we can and should embrace this picture of law—that doing so resonates with our ordinary commitments and explains our practices in a way that gives them evident sense and value. In Chapter 1, I examine Mark Greenberg’s theory that law is the branch of morality created by the actions of legal institutions “in the legally proper way.” I argue that we should reject Greenberg’s version of the law-as-morality picture, but I suggest that Greenberg’s innovative view holds important lessons about the shape that the picture should take. In Chapter 2, I propose and defend an alternative theory. In short, I argue that law is the branch of morality that members of a political community have the privileged standing to hold one another to, in light of their community’s past political decisions. I believe that this account better captures our ordinary understanding of law and its various roles in a political community. In Chapter 3, I extend the law-as-morality picture to tort law. I argue that it helps us appreciate a view on which there is tort law, but there are no distinctively legal wrongs. Instead, I argue, we should understand tort law as a tool that enables a political community to recognize and respond to ordinary interpersonal wrongs that are, in some contestable sense, matters of public concern. (shrink)

This dissertation contains three standalone chapters, each of which addresses a different philosophical issue related to emotional assessment or emotion regulation. But each of these chapters contributes to the larger goal of understanding when and how we should regulate our emotions. In chapter 1, I examine what it means to say that an emotion is fitting. I argue that in order for an emotion to be fitting, it must do more than correctly represent its object; it must also mobilize the (...) individual to correctly respond to this object. My analysis, which also leads me to argue that action-responses can be fitting, suggests that fittingness is not fundamentally about the correctness of mental representations. In chapter 2, I investigate the relationship between emotions, emotion regulation, and evaluative understanding. I argue that if our goal is evaluative understanding, we should regulate our emotions in a particular, organized way, that involves both engagement with our emotional concerns, as well as disengagement. In chapter 3, I investigate the claim that fitting negative emotions have a distinctive final value, for epistemic or moral reasons, that calmer mental states cannot possess. I argue that this claim is false. We can, and often do, downregulate our emotions without losing anything of distinctive epistemic or moral final value. I conclude the dissertation by briefly describing the structure of a practical, normative model for emotion regulation. (shrink)

My research focuses on the moral evaluation of people’s motivations. A popular recent view in Philosophy is that good people are motivated by the considerations that make actions morally right (the “right-making features”). For example, this view entails that a Black Lives Matter protester can be a good person if she is motivated to engage in protest by the thought that it will bring about equality, or justice, since this is what makes engaging in protest morally right. But this view (...) entails that the protester cannot be a good person if she engages in protest because it is morally right. I think that this is a serious mistake. My view is that it is good to be explicitly committed to acting rightly and motivated by the moral rightness of one’s actions. More specifically, I explore the nature and defend the value of a complex state that I call "trying to act rightly". This comprises (a) wanting to act rightly, (b) thinking about which actions are right, and (c) doing the things that you think are right, because they are right. The three papers of my Dissertation each make part of the case for trying to act rightly. My first paper, “Praiseworthy Motivations”, addresses the view that it is good to be motivated by the right-making features but not good to be motivated to act rightly. I argue that this view rests on poorly-drawn comparison cases that are not genuine minimal pairs, and that well-constructed cases show these two types of motivation to be equally good. I address the worry that trying to act rightly leads people with false moral beliefs to act wrongly, by noting that this also applies to motivation by right-making features, since people can be motivated by a right-making feature while being mistaken about which acts have this feature. I then argue that we should distinguish carefully between motivations, actions, and beliefs when evaluating these well-meaning but morally mistaken agents. The second paper, “We Can Have Our Buck and Pass It, Too”, addresses the view that the fact that an act is morally right is not a genuine reason to perform it, and that our reasons for action are instead provided by the right-making features. I argue that this view rests on a confused picture of moral metaphysics, which would rule out any case in which one reason to perform an act is partially metaphysically constituted by another fact that is also a reason to perform the same act – as, for example, when a salad both is healthy and contains vegetables. I then sketch an alternative picture of moral metaphysics, on which genuine reasons for action can be metaphysically related to one another. My third paper, “Accidentally Doing the Right Thing”, uses general reflections on the nature of deliberate action and its relationship to praiseworthiness to argue that someone is only praiseworthy for acting rightly if she was trying to act rightly. I apply this idea to the philosophical debate on moral worth, defending the Kantian view that actions have moral worth just in case they are instances of someone’s trying to act rightly and succeeding. This is a radical departure from the most popular contemporary view on moral worth, and requires a re-evaluation of the main case discussed in this literature: that of Huckleberry Finn. (shrink)

Gender seems to be everywhere in the norms governing our social world: from how to be a good friend and how to walk, to children’s clothes. It is not surprising then that a difficulty in identifying someone’s gender is often a source of discomfort and even anxiety. Numerous theorists, including Judith Butler and Charlotte Witt, have noted that gender is unlike other important social differences, such as professional occupation or religious affiliation. It has a special centrality, ubiquity and importance in (...) social practices. This observation moves us away from the classic philosophical question ‘what is gender?’ towards a more underappreciated one: ‘what is the role of gender’? To answer this question, I introduce the notion of social standing, which refers to our ability to enter into social relations. Social standing distinctions are an important feature of human societies. However, our existing philosophical tools do not adequately capture this notion: it is neither a moral distinction, nor is it reducible to hierarchy. I offer a conception of our entry into social relations as always conditioned by various shared representational assumptions about social subjects. When individuals are anomalous with respect to those assumptions, their social standing is in doubt. This explains important forms of uncommon and peculiar treatment across societies. I argue that forms of social devaluation on the basis of severe and visible disability in our society are central examples of diminished social standing. In our social context, being hard to recognize through the matrix of gender makes one representationally anomalous and imperils one’s social standing. Gender plays a fundamental role because gender legibility is a precondition for full social standing. Gender norms parallel ‘ability norms’ in this respect, linking notions of normalcy in scholarship on gender and in scholarship on disability. Social standing also explains two key phenomena about gender. Firstly, it tells us why our social practices and norms are pervasively gendered. Given the performative and relational nature of gendered positions, this is necessary for constant gender legibility. Secondly, social standing recognition accounts for social anxiety phenomena around gender ambiguity. These phenomena are reactions to anomaly as a threat to our social systems of meaning. In the final part of my dissertation, I consider some political consequences of my view. Understanding this special role of gender allows us to identify a distinct type of backlash to feminist social change that is particularly insidious. It is not driven by the hierarchical investments of the most gender-privileged, but rather by our collective investment in gender as a system of social coordination. I explore 2000s ‘raunch feminism’ to argue for this hypothesis. Gender’s role as a conditioning parameter of social standing puts systematic pressure on all would-be social subjects to be gender legible. This requires that individuals position themselves in recognizably gendered ways within social practices. But when gender differentiation is eroded, this positioning becomes tricky. This gives rise to a disorientation I call ‘meaning vertigo’. Meaning vertigo prompts attempts at reinstating a clear gendered system. In the process, gender equality suffers a serious set-back. To make substantial feminist progress, we must unseat gender from its central position in social domains like sexuality. I suggest that the best way to do this may be by foregrounding other aspects of social identity as systems of social coordination, instead of working on gender directly. (shrink)

When we engage in moral deliberation, we take it upon ourselves to consider our conduct not only from our own perspective, but from the perspectives of others. I take this to be obvious. It is far from obvious, though, what this requirement amounts to. When we consider other people’s perspectives, what is it that we must do? Are we merely obligated to consider how we would feel if we were in their shoes? Or must we imagine how they feel? What (...) reason do we have to consider other people’s perspectives in the first place? And how does doing so affect our moral judgments? In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith presents an account of imaginative perspective taking and moral evaluation that answers these questions. Based on a close reading of Smith’s text, and drawing on recent work in both philosophy and social psychology, I argue that we are required to consider other people’s perspectives in virtue of our status as members in a moral community of independent and mutually accountable equals. We imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes not to experience their feelings, but to determine how they ought to feel. We imagine ourselves in their shoes as part of an effort to find common ground: to construct a shared perspective from which to collectively judge the propriety or impropriety, justice or injustice, of our (and their) conduct. I argue that Smith’s account of imaginative perspective taking leads not to utilitarianism (as is commonly thought), but to a contractualist theory of moral evaluation. (shrink)

This dissertation examines how Hermes Trimegistus, legendary sage and author associated with the pagan god Mercury, came to be seen as a cultural mediator for learned men of different religious traditions in medieval and early modern Spain. Through this figure, who represented the ideal teacher and philosophical mentor to many pre-modern thinkers and writers, it explores the role of non-Christian culture in the growth of Christian literature and philosophy in Spain. Studies of this period have tended to focus either on (...) the “three cultures” (coexistence, cultural exchange, polemics), or on the reception of the Classical tradition. This project shows that various themes and topics of Late Antiquity lay behind Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures alike, and thus served both as a cohesive factor among them and as a controversial influence within the particular orthodoxies of each of them. After explaining how the cultural, political, and religious circumstances of early modern Spain determined the reception and understanding of Hermes, this dissertation centers on a lesser-known but increasingly studied figure of Spanish Golden Age literature: Bartolomé Jiménez Patón (1569-1640). Jiménez Patón is the center of this project because he not only wrote the most complete treatise about Hermes Trimegistus of his time (what can be called the Answer, a short text included in his rhetorical treatise Mercurius Trimegistus), but also because he had a well-established network which connected him with the most important writers, erudite men, and even celebrities of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain. Since Patón was able to publicize his work about Trimegistus through his extended network, the Answer is a starting point to show what Mercurius (Hermes) Trimegistus, the ancient God or wise pagan man, meant for the Christian scholarship of renaissance and baroque Spain. This study also examines how in the same way that the philosophical background of the Hermetic writings in Antiquity was a mixture of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, in the Late Humanism represented by Jiménez Patón there is an equally eclectic reception of all three of them. Those three schools of philosophy reinterpreted in the early modern period, and the controversies with Christian dogma associated with them and Trimegistus, are the nucleus of the last chapters. They show how Hermes’s place in each one of these trends of thought was epitomized by Patón’s treatise. The Answer is analyzed as referential of its contemporary culture, allowing Spanish early modern scholars to be situated in a wider struggle over the status and survival of all non-Christian culture in Europe. (shrink)

This is an essay at the intersection of metaethics and the history of contemporary analytic philosophy. It explores the relationships between Allan Gibbard’s mature quasi-realist expressivism and (i) three non-naturalistic varieties of what I call “non-inflationary realism” and (ii) moral fictionalism. Moral or normative realism is frequently (if mistakenly) taken to involve certain existence-affirming external assumptions about the metaphysical status of substantive normative thought and discourse. The non-inflationary realists seek to embrace moral or normative objectivity and truth without any distinctly—as (...) they see it, “inflated”—moral or normative ontology. This position, along with a shared emphasis on the primacy of substantive moral or normative thought and discourse, brings them very close to Gibbard, and so to what it is tempting to treat as a strikingly different metaethical account. Focusing on the non-inflationary realists Ronald Dworkin, T.M. Scanlon, and Derek Parfit, I examine similarities among their views, and between each of these views and Gibbard’s. I argue that the non-inflationary realist project should be understood as including the work not only of these figures, characteristically seen as among its paradigmatic representatives, but also, crucially, that of Gibbard. They all agree that our moral or normative claims purport to state normative truths and that such claims are capable of being true or false and that when true they do not depend on the particular standpoint anyone happens to take. Our moral or normative thoughts can be characterized as beliefs. We can have moral knowledge. There are substantive moral and normative facts. These facts are not reducible to non-normative facts. Normative concepts cannot be analyzed in purely naturalistic terms; and normative facts do not depend on any robustly existent truth-makers. Focusing on these shared commitments enables me to home in on the apparent differences that nonetheless remain. They differ in significant respects, for instance, about whether—and, if so, to what extent—we can make any meaningful external (non-substantive) judgments about the moral or normative and about whether there is a role for property-based explanations that minimalism about the normative fails to capture. By investigating these and other differences, I shed light on what is at stake in giving an adequate account of our moral and normative thought and talk. I pursue this aim further by considering why it might seem that quasi-realist expressivism was a form of normative fictionalism or error theory—though it is not. I attempt here to clear up confusions stemming from common assumptions associated with terms like “realism,” “cognitivism,” or “fictionalism” with respect to morality or normativity. I distinguish some differences in the ways in which normative properties can be understood by non-inflationary realists and the roles they can play in explaining normativity. I underscore the implausibility of treating the moral domain as completely autonomous. And I attempt to offer suggestions regarding some conceptual options that remain to be further explored. I maintain that Gibbard makes explicit otherwise unacknowledged implications of Scanlon’s or Dworkin’s accounts, implications regarding deep differences between normative or moral and other domains, implications which might help explain the uneasiness that prompts Scanlon and Dworkin to resist Gibbard’s account and that pushes Parfit toward what seems to be a sort of intermediate position between non-inflationary and more ontologically committed realism. Non-inflationary realism forces us to rethink metaethics in interesting and promising ways. (shrink)

This dissertation reconstructs a neglected strand of nineteenth-century imagination—an atavistic but innovative challenge to humanism—in William Morris’s prose and poetry, with a focus on the mythological epics of his middle years. I stress Morris’s primary investments in premodern barbarism and inhuman nature, which I approach in terms of his self-avowed religion, paganism. My aim is to reconstruct this worldview at the levels of ethics, aesthetics, and historiography. In so doing, I distance Morris from a critical consensus which confines his work (...) to a teleological progression from Romanticism to Marxism, and link him forward, in his seeming backwardness, to the aristocratic, traditionalist strain of Modernism. I center my readings on The Earthly Paradise (1868) and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876), bringing them together with the poetry and criticism of Romantics including William Wordsworth and John Keats, Victorians such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, and High Modernist mainstays like W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. This dissertation sketches an alternative intellectual history of the long-nineteenth century, in which certain thinkers start from a Romantic veneration of the passions, but gradually strip away its governing dialectical framework, revealing a “dynamist” world of interacting forces. In Chapter 1, I distinguish Morris’s notion of paganism from that of the Romantics, building a genealogical through-line towards Modernist primitivism, which I use as a paradigm for explaining the metaphysical function of Hellenic and Norse gods in Morris’s epics. In Chapter 2, I apply this framework to Morris’s aesthetic philosophy, revealing a new model of impassioned artistry with unexplored origins in Hallam’s and Tennyson’s “poetry of sensation.” Carrying this method to its most radical conclusion, Morris paves the way for Yeats’s and Pound’s poetics of divine possession, and their conception of aesthetic form as objectified force. In Chapter 3, I build on critical discussions of Morris’s willful anachronism to read The Story of Sigurd the Volsung as an anti-historicist model of cyclical recurrence and dynamic tradition, paving the way for the Modernist motif of the return. (shrink)

How do emotional and social experiences influence the knowledge we produce about our world? Here I investigate this question in two contexts: the individual mind, as represented in literature, and recent critical practices in the humanities. I combine readings of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Beloved, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony with contemporary neuroscience to explore the roles of gender and community in trauma and healing, with particular attention to the way emotion shapes perception, cognition, (...) and memory. I lay the theoretical groundwork for this study with a sustained analysis of recent shifts away from poststructuralist accounts of the subject, as they are taking shape across contemporary critical theory and current public and academic receptions of neuroscience. At its heart, my project forges new paths for interdisciplinary exchange in order to shed light on the more underattended features of human knowledge, while foregrounding issues of gender,agency, and relationality. In the first half of the dissertation, I analyze trauma studies in the 1990s, and interdisciplinary engagements with neuroscience in the past decade, two movements whose vogue has been as substantial as it is surprising. That an era generally held to be poststructuralist, antibiological, and postmodern – that is, that conceives identity as fluid, shifting, and socially constructed – should be so fascinated by accounts of the subject that involve, of all things, permanence, indelibility, or biology, is intriguing. In these chapters, I work to contextualize these fields historically, culturally, and theoretically, and to compare their symbolic investments, with particular attention to the role of affect in their intellectual reception. In the second half of the dissertation, I explore how accounts of the mind and the brain might be thought together, focusing on the role of gender and of community in traumatic memory and healing through the lens of the core novels in dialogue with contemporary neuroscience. In advancing innovative frameworks for combining science and the humanities, my goal is not only to deepen our understanding of knowledge production, but also to expand our repertoire of methods of pursuing knowledge. (shrink)

This project originates from the necessity to explain an uncanny fusion detected between cosmopolitan characteristics which Antonio Gramsci ascribed to Italian intellectual culture and the anti-humanistic connotations displayed by Italian Thought. Traditional cosmopolitan discourses inheriting the legacy of the Enlightenment generally align with humanistic perspectives whereas, as Roberto Esposito observes, Italian Theory has endorsed anti-humanistic viewpoints ever since the age of the Renaissance. How does one explain such a connection? Also, how are we to justify the ascetic categories of mysticism, (...) weakness, slowness, bareness, etc. which proliferated among Italian thinkers starting from the late 1970s? In response to these questions, this work attempts to define the position that contemporary Italian philosophy defends with respect to the current debate on cosmopolitan theory. Neo-Kantian solutions proposed by authors such as Jϋrgen Habermas, Daniele Archibugi and David Held, will certainly be given some consideration. Importantly, these discourses acknowledge the necessity to rethink the role of both the state and international relations in view of the brutalities perpetrated by 20th century totalitarianisms and the present globalized geopolitical scenario. Advocating a reinforcement of global powers and counting faithfully on the authority of law, these theories nonetheless elicit some perplexities. On one hand, they presuppose a disbelief within people’s self-emancipating capacities and, on the other, are not sufficiently critical of the neoliberal agenda. This is even more evident when considering that most of the said authors do not express skepticism with respect to the promotion of human rights. While human rights are certainly needed now more than ever, in several cases they align with both a profit-oriented and imperialistic mentality. It is relieving to discover that cosmopolitanism was initially founded by the Greek Cynics as a non-humanistic discourse and that several authors, including Peter Sloterdijck and William Desmond, highlighted similarities connecting Greek Cynicism with contemporary European modes of thinking. The Cynic perspective can help one solve many of the aforementioned doubts, because it rejects conventional societal values such as wealth, fame, and power, while promoting moral ideals of liberty, equality, self-sufficiency, and ascetic practices. In view of these premises, this study will pursue the hypothesis that, beginning with the publication of Massimo Cacciari’s Krisis (1976), Italian Philosophy and Literature have embraced a critical rhetoric which partially moves away from Marxian views and gradually retrieves cynic ideas. More specifically, the inquiry will unfold along two different paths: the historical-cultural analysis will be utilized as a material support for reaching theoretical-philosophical targets. Regarding the historical-cultural aspect, I will clarify to what extent contemporary Italian philosophy and literature retrieve Greek Cynic contents. This part of the theory will develop according to three fundamental factors which separate the sphere of the “human” from the domain of the “non-human”. The first two factors, “reason” and “language”, will be discussed within chapter 2 by exploring the work of Massimo Cacciari, Gianni Vattimo, and literature from the 1977 movement. “History” will represent the third pivotal discriminating factor in chapter 3, focusing on Franco Cassano’s Southern Thought and Giorgio Agamben’s post-humanism. The ultimate intention, which is philosophical, is to extrapolate from Italian Cynicism a critical cosmopolitan discourse that destabilizes neoliberal ideological structures and dissociates principles of local autonomy from cultural protectionism and anti-immigration claims. (shrink)

Chapter One of this dissertation examines the scope of the epistemic imperative to pursue accurate belief, beginning by arguing that the accuracy that comes from believing self-fulfilling prophecies has no epistemic value. It then extends that argument’s reasoning to present a theory of the distinction between belief and decision: pure beliefs concern propositions whose truth values are entirely independent of an agent’s actions, pure decisions concern propositions whose truth values are entirely dependent on an agent’s actions, and there many cases (...) in between, rendering the distinction between belief and decision a spectrum, not a bright line. The chapter examines a variety of cases to illustrate its point, both original ones and well-known ones drawn from the literature on epistemic consequentialism. Chapter Two presents a theory of the act of suspending judgment about a proposition, exploring the question of how the concept fits within a notion of degrees of belief. It considers the merits of reducing suspension of judgment to the absence of belief, to middling precise credence, and to imprecise credence, concluding that each reduction fails to capture all paradigmatic cases such as agnosticism about God, jurors’ suspensions of judgment about defendants’ guilt, and Descartes’ suspension of judgment at the beginning of his Meditations. The chapter concludes by presenting an affirmative theory: one who suspends judgment about a proposition chooses not to use their belief about it in all the ways people normally use beliefs. By doing this, they allow the rest of their beliefs to evolve in the way they would have if the agent held no belief about the proposition they have suspended judgment on. Chapter Three presents a theory of how agents learn new concepts. It begins by describing the problem: the Bayesian theory of learning by conditioning upon evidence explains how people can improve their existing beliefs but is silent on the question of how they can acquire new beliefs about new propositions. The chapter outlines a theory of conceptual learning that uses the same basic ingredients as learning by conditioning and can work hand-in-hand with it. The approach revolves around the use of a catch-all hypothesis that all one’s other hypotheses are wrong. Observing confounding evidence one’s regular hypotheses cannot account for raises confidence in one’s catch-all hypothesis near 1, driving them to modify their original partitions of hypotheses and observations, and their credences in propositions based on those partitions, in the most minimal way sufficient to lower credence in their catch-all hypothesis toward 0. The chapter presents and refutes influential arguments against the use of a catch-all hypothesis. It closes by describing the mechanisms by which new hypotheses and observations change an agent’s confidence. (shrink)

My dissertation urges a reconsideration of Plutarch’s importance as a philosopher. Plutarch is well known for his biographies and as a source for other authors, but not for original views of his own. A study that attempts to understand Plutarch sympathetically is surprisingly untried. Far from the uncharitable perception of Plutarch as a mere eclectic disseminator of popular philosophy, Plutarch offers a distinctive and appealing ethical view, neglected in the history of philosophy, which affirms the centrality of our passions in (...) ethical development and their essential place in the good life. It is a refreshing alternative to the overly rationalistic tradition of Stoicism, the main philosophical rival of Plutarch’s day. It is also different from other forms of Platonism. It does not ask us to abandon familiar, positive features of our emotional life and intimacy with others, unlike the otherworldly Platonisms we often find later in antiquity. I explore the centrality of passions in Plutarch’s moral philosophy primarily through the close reading of his ethical writings, the Moralia, vis-à-vis Plato’s dialogues, the traditions spawned from Plato’s Academy, and rival philosophical schools. In the Introduction to my dissertation, I begin with Plutarch’s presentation of himself as part of the continuing tradition of Plato’s Academy, a living tradition for Plutarch that is united, from Socrates to his own day, by a commitment to critical reflection rather than by a commitment to a set of dogmas or doctrines. Given this view of Plato’s Academy, Plutarch takes a distinctive position in holding that emotions and emotional vulnerability are essential to social virtues and genuine concern for other individuals, in contrast with Stoicism. I take up this point in Chapter 1 of my dissertation, where I examine Plutarch’s criticisms of the rival ethical theory of Stoic “appropriation” or “identification” (oikeiōsis) which Plutarch argues ironically alienates us from our own human nature and from other human beings. In Chapter 2, I explore Plutarch’s Platonic psychology and analyze his arguments on the appropriateness and naturalness of grief. Plutarch’s position that passions should be moderated and serve specific purposes sits in contrast with the advice to minimize and eradicate emotions such as grief as far as one is able in Plato’s Republic. In Chapter 3, I show that for Plutarch passions are not only ineradicable aspects of embodied life, but are also necessary for acting in the world, can enhance and intensify virtuous action, and can aid in the pursuit of virtue. Life with passions is better than without them. Chapter 4 is an examination of the positive role that shame plays in correcting one’s actions and character in Plutarch’s moral psychology. In Chapter 5, I turn to the prominent role emotions play in the formation of character. In contrast to the Old Academy, Plutarch argues that the most important preparation for the virtuous life begins with the formation of our passionate nature in childhood. In Chapter 6, I argue that Plutarch provides an alternative theory of moral development to the Stoic theory of oikeiōsis, placing the passion of affection at the heart of our social development. Affection serves as the seed, as it were, of our ever-expanding sense of identification with others. As we attempt to fulfill our nature in imitation of the divine (homoiōsis theōi), we cultivate divine qualities while remaining fully human with passions. (shrink)

Our words are vague, yet the world is precise. This dissertation consists of three essays that jointly attempt to articulate, explore, and defend this claim. In the first essay, I present my positive proposal for a non-metaphysical treatment of vagueness. Inspired by research on the Problem of the Many, I claim that we are speaking many perfectly precise languages simultaneously and that each speech act involves uttering many perfectly precise sentences. This position, which I call supersententialism, is the most plausible (...) alternative to metaphysical vagueness: it provides a fully reductive account of vagueness that preserves the T-schema. The second essay aims to address a rampant, albeit unnoticed, argument schema that purports to show that non-metaphysical accounts of vagueness cannot explain vagueness in fundamental, or perfectly natural, properties. In response, I propose a position that I call ersatz metaphysical vagueness according to which the term ‘perfectly natural’ is vague. Ersatz metaphysical vagueness retains the idea that the world is precise, but replicates the advantages of genuine metaphysical vagueness. I show how, by adopting this hypothesis, there can be vagueness in attributions of perfectly natural properties arising from the vagueness in our notion of perfect naturalness rather than from ‘the world itself’. Ersatz metaphysical vagueness thus provides us with a highly general alternative to genuine metaphysical vagueness. The final essay explores the relationship between metaphysical vagueness and ontological deflationism. Ontological deflationist positions treat the quantifier as having a highly plastic meaning. This plasticity naturally leads to vagueness in the quantifier. Thus, ontological deflationists are committed to vague existence. Is this vague existence ‘metaphysical vagueness’ or ‘vagueness in the world’? The rest of the essay clarifies this question and answers it under various clarifications. (shrink)

This course serves as an advanced seminar in critical methods as applied to media and digital studies. This includes analyses of both text and platform. As a part of our inquiry we will first consider what it means to engage in critical work, situation our work within the larger field. We will then explore different approaches to this work, including production, audience research, and discourse analysis. We then consider methods specific to digital studies including CTDA and digital ethnography. Through careful (...) analysis and play we will consider how the digital humanities allow us to ask new questions in new ways. Throughout the term we will continue to develop our own ethical guidelines for our work building on the work done in internet studies, critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, critical communication and philosophy. Finally, we will consider how the digital positions critical work for public audiences. (shrink)

Speech acts—promises, apologies, jokes, orders, threats, compliments—are actions we perform with words. This dissertation challenges us to move away from an individualistic theory of speech acts, where the focus is on the speaker and the moment of speech, and towards a more fully social theory of speech acts—a theory of how we perform actions with words over time with others. I call this a Social Contestation Theory of speech acts. Within the philosophy of language, established theories of speech acts present (...) speech acts as actions a speaker performs intentionally in the moment of speaking, requiring either no audience response or only a minimal form of audience uptake (i.e. interpretation of what kind of speech act an utterance is). My dissertation calls this standard picture into question and reconceptualizes what it means to perform a speech act—I argue that performing a speech act is a temporally extended process, which goes beyond the moment of utterance, and within which audience responses play a crucial ongoing role. The Social Contestation Theory of speech acts I develop illuminates the ways that the speech acts we perform are not wholly within our control—speakers can perform some speech acts (such as threats, urgings, and orders) without intending to do so. It also builds on efforts to identify and counter forms of speech-based injustice, highlighting the way power shapes which speech acts we perform and the ethical and political conflicts which can arise within a speaker’s audience. (shrink)

Within the canonical Sutta Piṭaka (“Basket of Suttas”) of the classical South Asian Śrāvakayāna Buddhist tradition, the Buddha is depicted as claiming that there is something called ‘woman-indriya’ (itth-indriya) and something called ‘man-indriya’ (puris-indriya). While these claims appear only a handful of times in the extensive version of the Sutta Piṭaka that we have today, the rarity of canonical statements about gender meant that Śrāvakayāna Buddhist philosophers often invoked these two gender-related indriyas when advancing their metaphysical theories about gender. In (...) current scholarship about these gender-related indriyas, it is generally accepted that they mean the same thing across the Sutta Piṭaka and the later Abhidharma Buddhist commentarial texts—they are material faculties within the bodies of individuals, determining an individual’s biological sex characteristics and gendered behaviours. I disagree. In my dissertation, I focus on demonstrating three different metaphysical accounts of the gender-related indriyas that were found within the texts of the classical Śrāvakayāna tradition, resulting in a multiplicity of attitudes about gender. The first chapter argues, based on the classical linguistic analysis (nirvacana) of ‘woman-indriya’ and ‘man-indriya’ and descriptions within the Sutta Piṭaka, that these terms refer to whatever is most powerful (indriya) over the soteriologically negative outcome of becoming fettered to a ‘woman self’ (itth-attan) and ‘man self’ (puris-attan). Here, I argue that the invocation of ‘woman self’ and ‘man self’ means that discussions about gender-related indriyas in the Sutta Piṭaka should be understood as a further elaboration of the central claim within this collection of texts that any and all views of self are inaccurate and must be abandoned. My second chapter focuses on identifying what is indriya or most powerful over this soteriological outcome within the Sutta Piṭaka. Based on the Saṃyoga Sutta’s description of an individual mentally generating (manasi karoti) what is indriya or most powerful over the fettering to a gendered self, I argue that ‘indriya over woman’ and ‘indriya over man’ are not described as singular material faculties, but as series of irrational mental generations (ayoniso manasi-kāras) on the part of the individual. These involve inaccurately labelling a variety of objects of attention as belonging to 'woman' or 'man' and as 'internal to self' or 'external to self', causing the individual to not only view the world through these gendered categories, but to become fettered to a gendered self. My third chapter focuses on the later Abhidharma Buddhist tradition which formed around the teachings of the Sutta Piṭaka. Where current scholarship claims that there is a single Abhidharma Buddhist view of the gender indriyas, I demonstrate through records from the Mahā-vibhāṣā (‘The Great Compendium’) that everything about the metaphysical status of the gender-related indriyas was up for debate. Eventually, the Abhidharma Vaibhāṣika view that these indriyas were real collections of atoms that held power over biological sex and gendered behaviour emerged as the dominant view. But even during this period, Vaibhāṣika-instructed philosophers like Vasubandhu pushed back against this view. Though he allowed that these indriyas were material faculties, he rejected that material entities could be most powerful over the arising of gendered conceptual distinctions and behaviours. He proposed a dualist account where these material indriyas were only powerful over biological sex, attributing gendered behaviour to consciousness or mind (vijñāna) instead. (shrink)

We use rules to decide what to do with scarce resources. Questions about rules matter insofar as we live primarily on the surface of the earth, relying on each other and non-human entities for food, habitation, and other essential goods and services. I argue over three separate but related papers that theories of property rules and other environmental management strategies sourced from normative ethics, economics, and political theory and their applications must engage with the natural sciences. By abstracting from biology (...) and ecology in particular, these theories will fail to capture promising solutions for our most pressing environmental problems to the detriment of the present and future generations they are meant to serve. The first chapter presents an interpretation of John Locke’s labor-based theory of property rights in the broader context of Locke’s moral philosophy and scientific empiricism. I argue that contrary to conventional libertarian and utilitarian interpretations, Lockean property theory actually prescribes weak substantive prescriptions for the content of property rights but strong normative and epistemic constraints on property transitions in order to deal with the novel social inequities imposed by shifting resource pressures. The second chapter presents a qualified defense for the use of carbon offsets in public and private climate policy, contrary to the blanket rejection of their use among philosophers and environmental law scholars based on their inadequacy in mitigating climate change. I reframe the normative challenge of climate change as an integration of mitigation and adaptation—climate resilience—rather than the narrower goal of climate mitigation and explain how these newfangled carbon rights can be reappropriated for this broader goal. The third chapter argues that diversified resource use offers a missing response to the tragedy of the commons. By abstracting from the ecosystem properties of natural resources, tragedy of the commons points toward a narrow set of institutional solutions focused on use restriction and exclusion. I show how this missing response might instead recommend application of a nondiscrimination rule for urban zoning regulations and farm subsidies in order to encourage agroecological diversification. (shrink)

It’s a commonplace principle that ‘ethical (sexual) interactions must be consensual.’ But what is involved in abiding by this principle? The first two chapters of my dissertation give partial answers to this question. While the first chapter focuses on consent-undermining coercion, the second chapter focuses on consent-undermining ignorance. In each chapter, I argue that consent can be undermined in far subtler ways than we often recognize, especially within close relationships. My specific focus is on illuminating how people can be blamed (...) into nonconsensual sex, though my arguments generalize beyond blame and beyond sex. Once we identify a sexual interaction as nonconsensual, how should we respond? The third chapter of my dissertation is about one dimension of this question. One might think that nonconsensual sex is the kind of wrong that is everyone’s business; anyone can blame perpetrators of nonconsensual sex. By contrast, I argue that in some cases of nonconsensual sex, it is impermissibly meddlesome for a ‘third party’ – someone who is neither the victim nor the perpetrator – to express blame to the perpetrator. This result, I contend, will help us to stop neglecting certain kinds of nonconsensual sex. By the end, I have illustrated three main themes. To begin, we cannot theorize well about consent and blame without attending to relationships. Conversely, we cannot theorize well about relationships without attending to consent. Finally, the language of consent comes along with a lot of associations, which behooves us to identify which associations to hold secure and which to let go. For instance, we should weaken the association between nonconsensuality and ‘public’ sanctions, such as third-party blame or criminal punishment. In sum, my dissertation explores different aspects of the relationship between consent, blame, and sex. (shrink)

This dissertation aims to contribute to two recently burgeoning literatures in philosophy: that surrounding conceptual engineering and that surrounding the metaphysics of gender. It begins with a criticism of the recent conceptual engineering literature, arguing that the idea of rationally warranted conceptual change raises irresolvable puzzles as long as the kind of rationality at work is assumed to be the familiar type of instrumental rationality. I then argue that another kind of rationally warranted conceptual change — one already investigated empirically (...) by developmental psychologists such as Susan Carey — can provide a model for conceptual changes involving non-instrumental modes of reasons-responsiveness. Chapter 2 argues that feminist approaches to the metaphysics of gender and the ethics of gender-ascription would be well served by exploring an anti-representationalist, pragmatist theory of linguistic meaning. The argument here is that such a pragmatist approach posits a constitutive relationship between the truth of a gender-ascription and the normative commitments it expresses. Theory that thinks of itself in this way can regard itself as a kind of immanent critique. Finally, chapter 3 sketches how we might think about the ethics of gender-ascription and — if chapter 2 is correct about the constitutive relationship between these — the metaphysics of gender. It’s argued that the fundamental values of freedom and equality, and the nature of social identity as a call for recognition, militate in favor of respecting transgender identities and disavowing hegemonic conceptions of gender. (shrink)

This dissertation contains three essays on individual and collective decision making. Understanding and modeling how individuals make choices is at the heart of economics. In chapter I, I empirically estimate the degree to which the marginal utility of income changes across income groups. The estimation is based on survey responses indicating willingness to pay to avoid unpleasant experiences and relies on the assumption that the associated disutility is equal on average across income groups. This assumption implies that any differences in (...) average willingness to pay for relief are entirely driven by differences in marginal utilities of income. The results suggest that marginal utility of income is constant across income groups, implying that (cardinal) utility is roughly linear in dollars. While this paper is primarily about how individuals make choices, a better understanding of individual preferences and motivation can inform collective decisions, where the preferences or needs of different people must be considered simultaneously. How to provide effective information to policymaker’s who are making collective decisions is the focus of chapter II where we show how to get unbiased estimates of welfare from observational outcomes with heterogeneous populations. Though ubiquitous in research and practice, mean-based “value-added” measures may not fully inform policy or welfare considerations when policies have heterogeneous effects, impact multiple outcomes, or seek to advance distributional objectives. In this paper we formalize the importance of heterogeneity for calculating social welfare and quantify it in an enormous public service provision problem: the allocation of teachers to elementary school classes. Using data from the San Diego Unified School District we estimate heterogeneity in teacher value-added over the lagged student test score distribution. Because a majority of teachers have significant comparative advantage across student types, allocations that use a heterogeneous estimate of value-added can raise scores by 34-97% relative to those using only standard value-added estimates. These gains are even larger if the social planner has heterogeneous preferences over groups. Because reallocations benefit students on average at the expense of teachers’ revealed preferences, we also consider a simple teacher compensation policy, finding that the marginal value of public funds would be infinite for bonuses of up to 14% of baseline pay. These results, while specific to the teacher assignment problem, suggest more broadly that using information about effect heterogeneity might improve a broad range of public programs—both on grounds of average impacts and distributional goals. While chapter II focuses on how to aid in collective decision making, Chapter III focuses on understanding how, in real life, collective decisions are made. I examine how preference formation may directly lead to state fiscal policy interdependence. I start by laying out a formal model for state fiscal interdependence. The model is built on two core ideas. First, voters look at “similar" states via news coverage to determine what a normal level of public spending is. Second, governments respond to these shifting preferences by maximizing the probability of reelection. The model informs an empirical analysis which uses state newspaper articles to form a new metric of state inter-connectivity. This metric is compared against established metrics used in the literature. (shrink)

This dissertation takes up desire as the central analytic to examine the founding and consolidating of settler-colonial rule in Northeastern Turtle Island (Québec and the Great Lakes area, territory claimed by the French Empire as Nouvelle-France) as well as Indigenous women’s self-making and resistance in that area. I explore how the cultivation of desire is simultaneously an intense site of political theorizing and colonial investment, as well as Indigenous women’s self-making and resistance. Centering embodiment and embodied practices, I show how (...) colonists and Indigenous women crafted different forms of attachment and desire, as well as their respective political efficacy in early modern settler-colonial politics. If the settler-colonial cultivation of desire hinges on disciplining Indigenous women’s bodies and regulating their affect, how did Indigenous women react to, subvert, and resist such colonial interventions in and through their embodied practices? I examine these processes and practices by weaving together close textual analyses and archival-historical research. Chapters are organized thematically. Chapter 1 introduces desire as a central inquiry of political philosophy and theory. I articulate the overall theoretical problematic and my methodology. Chapter 2 is a close reading of Jean Racine’s Iphigénie to tease out what I call the “imperial fantasy of consent” manifested through the enslaved foreign woman’s attachment to her colonizer. Chapter 3 examines the settler-colonial cultivation of desire through an analysis of settler-colonial educational practices aimed at managing Indigenous children’s bodies and regulating their affect. In Chapters 4 and 5 I turn to Indigenous women’s embodied practices as ways of cultivating decolonial desire. Chapter 4 examines Indigenous women’s ascetic practices that I argue show a form of self-making and community-building. Chapter 5 examines Indigenous women’s agricultural labor, i.e., labor in land as decolonial praxis. A concluding chapter reflects on the theoretical and political efficacy of centering desire, attachment, and embodied relations to studies of subjectivity, power, and resistance, as well as to ongoing efforts in theorizing settler-colonialism as a distinct modality of power. Throughout the dissertation, I work toward a decolonial account of desire, which has two different valences. First, I develop a decolonial reading of desire—that is, I dissect how imperial ideology took shape in early modern French literary and cultural productions, as well as colonial discourses, through the articulation of desire. Second, I develop an alternative account of desire as concrete attachments and relations cultivated through embodied practices. This study therefore contributes to feminist political theory, history of political thought, settler-colonial and Indigenous studies, as well as studies of early modern France and the French Empire. (shrink)

This dissertation is a comparative study of satirical works from four cultural spheres of Europe. Moving among texts in English, French, Russian, and Serbian, I investigate the technical and creative characteristics that define the genre of narrative satire. Distinguished stylistically from other literary genres and from theoretical, philosophical and ideological discourses, narrative satire provides a pragmatic, sober and realistic outlook on social life, and emphasizes a self-critical and subversive perspective on the culture of its origin. I argue for a context-based (...) reevaluation of satire and its role in the history of both East and West European cultural canons. The study shows how various writers employed satirical narratives and plots based on the concept of the journey to reflect on decisive social and political issues from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Satire emerges as a particularly relevant cultural agent in my discussion of several influential artists who left an indelible mark on their respective cultures. I focus on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire's Candide, Nikolai Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer, and Radoje Domanović's Ruminations of a Serbian Ox. I interpret the connections between these writers as evidence of an overlooked and important transnational and transeuropean literary tradition. This study testifies to the long-lasting and transformative power of satire, as it travels across cultures and languages. Each of my chapters focuses on a unique cultural context and moment. I compare and contrast the conditions in the early eighteenth century England and pre-revolutionary France to the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century processes in Russia and the Kingdom of Serbia. I explore the unique literary and historical circumstances of each writer as I make an argument that knowledge of the context is essential for comprehension of satire. Ultimately, I interpret satire as a form of knowledge and philosophical wisdom, and a way to learn about the past and think about the present. I emphasize the significance of the journey as a narrative device. The journey is not just a theme or topic, but the structural principle that generates the narratives I discuss. The journey is a way to tell stories, experience the world and acquire profound knowledge that I call “satirical wisdom.” Through narration based on movement and action, satire manages to travel between cultures and enlighten its readers. My dissertation presents four detailed case studies to support this argument. (shrink)

Categories of spatial experience and inner experience are explored through an inquiry into phenomenology, phenomenal art, spatial theory, contemplative practice, and eastern philosophy. An intuitive research process guides the creative practice as it materializes as immersive and sensorial installation and sculpture. The creative work is centered in the embodied perception of space and awareness of self. Perception is heightened by elements such as sound, light, and a sculp- tural environment.The aesthetic and archetypal form of the labyrinth and its paradoxicality, is (...) contemplated philosophically and physically through readings and renderings. The space within a drawing of a lab- yrinth is transposed into a space which the viewer may enter into. The drawing of an artist momentarily assumes the role of proposal drawing for another artist's installation. This relationship between the artist's drawing and another artist's space are reimagined in an expanded field. One's creative work becomes a platform to contemplate and make space for the work of others. A sculptural object becomes a hybrid of another artist's processes or a meditation on the connection between language, drawing, and sculpture. (shrink)

Hours of Infinity is an ongoing project that seeks to record the “imperfect Eternal” – the human experience of the infinite, with all its flaws. A rigorously imprecise drawing method is at work in the three projects documented here, leading to visual objects that are uneven, absurd, and fragile symbols for something believed to be symmetrical, profound and everlasting. This MFA thesis documents the images, sounds, video, and performance event created thus far for Hours of Infinity. It also discusses the (...) artistic, philosophical, and textual influences that fed directly into the creation of the work. (shrink)

According to Kant, the supreme principle of morality is: “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law” (G 4:421). This principle has come to be known as the Formula of Universal Law (“FUL”). Few philosophers believe it succeeds. But, I argue, few philosophers have understood what FUL means. This dissertation offers a full defense of FUL. It is, in fact, the supreme principle of morality—and it can successfully (...) derive a viable theory of permissible action and virtuous willing. Kant was right. Chapter 1 considers FUL’s role in relation to Kant’s subsequent formulations of the Categorical Imperative and the broader architectonic of duty he sets up in the Metaphysics of Morals. I argue that Kant’s formulations are equivalent insofar as they are each expressions of the very same moral principle. And I suggest that FUL’s two tests correspond to Kant’s later distinction between duties of right and duties of virtue. Thus, FUL’s contradiction-in-conception test can be used to derive duties governing permissible action, and FUL’s contradiction-in-the-will test can be used to derive duties governing virtuous willing. This sets up the framework for the remainder of the dissertation. Chapters 2 and 3 together interpret and defend Kant’s account of permissible action. In Chapter 2, I argue that we should fundamentally reconceive of the nature and purpose of Kant’s permissibility criterion. Kant’s contemporary interpreters have adopted too psychologistic an account of the maxim. Kantian maxims have little to do with the motivating principles of actual agents. Relying on Kant’s historical context and his account of maxims in rational agency, I argue that FUL tests means-end principles which describe act-types. When its permissibility test is applied to such principles, it can viably derive general duties. Chapter 3 continues this positive account of Kant’s permissibility test and defends it from common objections. I argue that the contradiction-in-conception test rejects an act-type when it would be inconceivable for all rational agents to be directly governed by the type’s means-end imperative as a universal practical law. So understood, FUL condemns act-types because: (1) they are hypocritically self-serving, (2) they inflict agential harm on other agents, or (3) they inflict self-harm motivated by self-love. I defend FUL’s derivations against such act-types against common criticisms, such as that they are circular or overbroad. Turning to prominent objections against Kant’s account of permissible action, I then argue that FUL correctly rules out all and only impermissible actions. Moreover, its conclusions are both nuanced and normatively defensible. In Chapter 4, I turn to Kant’s virtue ethics. I begin by considering the demands of Kantian virtue. I argue that we should reject accounts on which duties of virtue are merely less restrictive duties governing permissible action. Instead, I argue, they represent genuinely virtue-ethical requirements to promote morally worthy ends, namely, the ends of our own perfection and others’ happiness. I show that all of Kant’s duties of virtue can ultimately be traced back to one of these required ends. Then, I argue that FUL’s contradiction-in-the-will test can successfully derive our positive obligation to set the ends of virtue. I conclude that FUL is successful not only as a standard of permissibility, but also as the supreme principle of virtue. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that the younger Seneca uses food and eating throughout his corpus as a way of teaching Stoicism in the Latin language within his first-century Imperial Roman environment. Eating, a popular theme in much Latin literature of the Republic and early Empire, is a way of bridging philosophy and literature; since Seneca authors the first Stoic pedagogical project written in the Latin language, he needs to find ways to relate to his Roman readership. Writing about eating thus helps (...) makes Stoicism attractive and accessible to a Roman literary audience. In order to incorporate eating within his own brand of Stoicism, I argue that Seneca must provide a gloss on Republican moralists, especially Cato and Sallust, who view the human belly as a wholly negative thing, since in Seneca’s revamped version of Roman eating the belly is a digesting organ with a job to do. I build on Seneca’s rehabilitation of the Republican belly by arguing that he revises the Roman cultural institution of the exemplum, a concept of great importance to Roman norm-setting, in order to emphasize its appropriateness to eating. There are limitations in highlighting exemplary eaters in order to teach proper eating habits, however, since the exempla that Seneca details all eat either extremely excessively or only very simple foods. So that he can address foods that are popular in contemporary literature, Seneca turns to the genre of satire, which has an intrinsic connection to food and eating, in order to revisit the concept of eating in Roman literature and make it aid his Stoic philosophical message. Lastly, since Seneca emphasizes the need of his reader, the aspiring Stoic, not only to read his text but also to be literarily and philosophically productive themselves, I argue that Seneca uses the Latin literary trope of “literary consumption” (that is, the theme of eating literature) in order to inculcate proper habits in his readers, who consume Seneca’s text (including the subject matter detailed throughout this dissertation) and must productively reproduce the Stoic life lessons that he encourages. Seneca’s relationship with eating in Roman literature is thus one of reception and revision, as his goal in writing is to reconcile Stoicism with Roman literature and Roman literature with Stoicism. (shrink)

This dissertation contains a philosophical project and a psychological project. Together, they explore two central themes, and the relation between them: (1) doxastic control and the ethics of belief, and (2) the moral and epistemic import of close personal relationships. The philosophical project (Chapters 1 and 2) concerns a central puzzle in the ethics of belief: how can we make sense of apparent obligations to believe for moral or practical reasons, if we lack the ability to form beliefs in response (...) to such reasons? I draw on empirical work in emotion regulation to make progress on this problem of doxastic control. The psychological project (Chapters 3 and 4) concerns the role of relational closeness in moral judgment: though empirical moral psychology has traditionally focused on judgments about anonymous strangers, I contribute to a growing body of work showing how personal relationships can dramatically affect moral reasoning. Chapter 1, “Acceptance and the Ethics of Belief,” develops an empirically plausible and mechanistically detailed account of acceptance, the attitude classically characterized as “taking a proposition as a premise in practical reasoning and action.” I argue that acceptance centrally involves preventing a belief from playing its characteristic role in guiding cognition, reasoning, and action, that this centrally involves a “cognitive gating” operation, and that this view gains empirically plausibility by its analogy to well-studied strategies in emotion regulation. Ultimately, I defend acceptance as doxastic response modulation. I propose that this account holds promise for addressing puzzles in the ethics of belief—a domain plagued by the central theoretical challenge of our inability to believe for non-evidential reasons. Chapter 2, “Reframing Epistemic Partiality,” applies my account of acceptance to a specific debate in the ethics of belief: the epistemic partiality debate, which asks whether we sometimes ought to believe against the evidence regarding our friends. Though compelling, the partialist view has been plagued by serious objections. I argue that the debate has been focused on the wrong doxastic attitude: recasting our duties of friendship as duties of acceptance, rather than belief, satisfies the partialist intuitions, without falling prey to the varied objections against the view. Chapter 3, “What We Would (but Shouldn’t) Do for Those We Love” builds on prior work demonstrating that people say they are far more likely to report a distant other, compared to a close other, who commits a serious moral transgression. Across four studies, I demonstrate that people not only say they would protect close others more than distant others, but also that they say it is morally right to show such partiality towards close others. Furthermore, I show that people say that they would protect close others more than they think they should—suggesting that moral decisions involving those closest to us may be a context in which people are particularly likely to fail to do what they think is right. Chapter 4, “How Relationship Affects Adolescents’ Decisions to Report Moral Transgressions,” investigates how 6th-9th graders respond to the transgressions of close versus distant others. Given the social importance of peer relationships in adolescence, the role of relationship is central to understanding this stage of moral development. I show that adolescents—like adults—are more likely to report distant others who transgress than close others, and more likely to report serious moral transgressions than minor ones. (shrink)

Plato and Aristotle each present traditional forms of religious practice (e.g., sacrifice, choral performance, prayer, and temple cult) as activities that are worth performing. Because these philosophers advocated such unconventional theological views, their endorsement of conventional religious practice strikes some readers as surprising. This dissertation examines why Plato and Aristotle defended traditional religious practice. Specifically, it investigates their views on its efficacy (i.e., what benefits religious practice produces and how it is thought to produce them). Chapters 1-2 provide the intellectual (...) background necessary to appreciate Plato and Aristotle’s individual contributions. Chapter 1 outlines a view of efficacy that was common in the archaic period (the “Traditional View”). It shows that the literature from that period consistently promoted the idea that, through the performance of traditional religious practice, humans can influence the gods to effect change in all spheres of life: in the cosmos, the city, and the individual psyche. Chapter 2 shows that this view was destabilized in the dawn of the classical period, in the fifth century BCE. The pre-Socratic philosophers and Sophists of this period introduced several theological innovations that forced their proponents to reevaluate the traditional story about what traditional Greek religious practices accomplished and how they accomplished it. Plato both expands and narrows the understanding of efficacy that is set forth in the archaic age. He argues that, for a token religious practice to be successful, it must be performed according to certain ethical standards. Chapter 3 outlines Plato’s ethical criteria and argues that, while the philosopher, like proponents of the Traditional View, denies the efficacy of “illegitimate” performances that contravene these standards, he believes that religious practice can influence all realms of human life theogenically through the instrumentality of the gods. It also shows that Plato expands the modes of efficacy by introducing the possibility that religious practices produce benefits anthropogenically, without the assistance of the gods. Chapters 4-5 each detail a specific religious practice and articulate how Plato thought they could be executed according to his standards. Chapter 4 investigates Plato’s identification of choral performance and sacrifice as forms of play in the Laws, arguing that he imagined them to function as games do elsewhere in that work, when pursued in accordance with the laws and reason, and when performed for pleasure’s sake. Chapter 5 evaluates the role of petitionary prayer in Plato’s dialogues and shows that the philosopher valued the practice for its ability to facilitate intellectual achievement and integrated petitionary prayer into his psychology. Chapters 6-7 focus on Aristotle’s treatment of efficacy. Chapter 6 examines Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ and argues that, in contrast to Plato, Aristotle discards the Traditional View entirely by denying the ability of religious practices to move the gods to action or to effect change in the cosmos. It reconciles passages from the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, which seem prima facie to endorse conventional attitudes towards the gods, with the philosopher’s metaphysical views, which appear to contradict them. Chapter 7 examines the social and psychological benefits of religious practice in Aristotle’s Politics, where the philosopher claims that the institution of religion forms a necessary part of the city. It demonstrates that, for Aristotle, religious practice provides residents with rest and leisure, obligates them to observe laws, and promotes the development of friendship between residents. (shrink)

My dissertation defends the importance of epistemic norms on what I call ‘inquiring further.’ Inquiring further is a familiar practice we engage in when we redeliberate, gather more evidence, or double-check our beliefs. Nonetheless, many philosophers have argued that norms governing further inquiry are at most practical or moral norms. Against this, I argue that norms on inquiring further are central to our understanding of responsible epistemic agency. I do this by appealing to both the roles of epistemic evaluations and (...) our practices of holding agents epistemically accountable. My dissertation thereby expands and deepens our understanding of epistemic evaluations and normativity. Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on a different practice of inquiring further. The first, “A Puzzle About Fickleness,” motivates a puzzle about changes of mind resulting from redeliberation. The puzzle is to explain the asymmetry between one-off changes of mind, which often seem permissible, and multiple changes of mind—or fickleness—which often seem problematic. After motivating an epistemic solution to the puzzle, I propose and defend the Ratifiable Reasoning Account. On this solution, as agents redeliberate, they gain two types of evidence. First, they gain inductive evidence that they will not stably settle their belief. Second, this inductive evidence affords higher-order evidence that they are unreliable at assessing the matter at hand. The fact that fickle agents gain this higher-order evidence explains why fickleness can be epistemically—not just practically—irrational. The second chapter turns to our practices of evidence-gathering. In “Epistemic Norms on Evidence-Gathering,” I and my co-author, Carolina Flores, argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Though this view is intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has; justified or rational beliefs are those based on appropriate responses to that evidence. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. The third chapter, “Why Double-Check?”, explores the relationship between double-checking and knowledge. I argue that agents can simultaneously know that p and rationally double-check that p. Call this view the Synchronic Compatibility Thesis. Although intuitive, this thesis faces two challenges. First, some have argued that agents who double-check ought to suspend judgment while inquiring; they thus lose knowledge while double-checking, if only temporarily. Second, some have argued that if it is rational to double-check that p, then one does not know that p. This claim is motivated by strong conceptions of belief or pragmatic encroachment. I argue that these competing views fail to accommodate the many reasons why agents might double-check, ranging from seeking certainty to making one’s beliefs more resilient. Moreover, the alternative views rely on overly strong assumptions about what inquiry, knowledge, or belief requires. By exploring fickleness, evidence-gathering, and double-checking—three phenomena that traditional epistemology has neglected—this dissertation enriches epistemology by making it more relevant to real-world agents. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I explore how emotions operate under conditions of injustice. Specifically, my interest is in how one should deploy their emotions in order to combat patriarchally informed, affective ways of making sense of and responding to the social world. My dissertation consists of the following three papers. In the first paper, “Vindictive Anger,” I argue for two claims. First, that anger is not necessarily made morally worse whenever and to the extent that it involves a desire for payback. (...) Second, that in certain cases, anger’s retributive component is precisely what moralizes the emotion. Victims of sexual violence, I argue, paradigmatically deploy their anger as a way of getting their transgressor or, in some cases, the broader moral community, to more fully understand, through affect, the wrongness of their action. One can see this occur in the anger expressed by Chanel Miller in her victim’s impact statement, read aloud during the case of People v. Turner. When anger functions in this way, I propose, it serves to moralize the emotion. In the second paper, titled “Feminism and Suspect Femininity,” I ask how feminists should feel towards women who conform to suspect norms of appearance, and of hyper-femininity in particular. I present a novel type of empathy – proleptic empathy – which avoids treating women as either pitiful victims or as accomplices deserving of harsh moral criticism. Proleptic empathy requires switching back and forth between two types of imaginings: on the one hand, simulating what it is like to be in the woman’s shoes on the assumption that her suspect behavior stems from her will. On the other, simulating what it is like to be in the woman’s shoes on the assumption that her suspect behavior stems from external cultural influences. In the third paper, “Transitional Moral Contexts,” I address how one should feel towards the perpetrators who figure in the cases that have gone by the language of ‘grey rape’ or ‘bad sex’. These cases are ones that are rife with disagreement, especially amongst members of the moral community, who even disagree over whether they ought to count as cases of ‘sexual assault’ or ‘rape’. My suggestion is that the reason we have such difficulty adjudicating individuals’ responsibility for cases of bad sex is because these are instances of transitional moral contexts where what it is to act morally is in the process of being actively negotiated by the moral community. With this analysis in place, I present reasons for and against deploying shame against those who falter in these cases. (shrink)

This dissertation analyzes three legal doctrines that regulate unintentional aspects of criminal conduct. Chapter one defends the influence the law grants to an action’s unintended results in determining the extent of the agent’s criminal liability. First, I critique the argument that criminal law’s general mens rea requirement allows a result to affect the extent of a defendant’s criminal liability only if he possesses mens rea with respect to that result. The rules that define offenses and the rules that specify sentences (...) for individual criminal actions each guide conduct, but they do so differently. Effective offense definitions must be framed in terms of mental states, but effective sentencing rules need not be; therefore, mens rea must set the limits of liability, but the extent of liability need not depend on mens rea alone. Second, I argue that sentencing rules can most effectively guide offenders to reduce the risk that their offenses will unintentionally cause harm if those rules grade the seriousness of each offense based on its results, since the primary alternative, grading offenses based on their risk, requires methods of measuring and communicating risk that exceed the capacities of the criminal justice system. While chapter one addresses the extent of liability, chapters two and three address its scope: each presents an account of one of the two types of mens rea used to define unintentional crimes. Recklessness, the subject of chapter two, is often analyzed as requiring defendants to possess a belief (or similar mental state) directed towards the degree of risk an action creates. Defining offenses in terms of an agent’s beliefs about risk, however, guides individuals to evaluate actions in deliberation by estimating the degree of risk they create. And because individuals ordinarily cannot estimate risks accurately, such rules will not effectively guide them to reduce harm. Effective rules, I will argue, must identify prohibited actions in a different way—namely, through the features of those actions that make them unreasonably risky. The definition of recklessness does not itself identify those features directly; instead, by requiring individuals to comply with the standard of conduct of the law-abiding person, recklessness indirectly incorporates into law the social norms that regulate dangerous activities. To be reckless, then, defendants must recognize the features of their conduct in virtue of which it violates such a norm. Finally, chapter three analyzes negligence. Criminal negligence is paradoxical: even though culpability ordinarily requires advertence, negligent defendants are typically understood to be culpable for a risk they inadvertently create. Rather than rejecting culpability for negligence or expanding culpability beyond advertence, I dissolve the paradox by reconceptualizing negligence. Negligent defendants are culpable despite their failure to perceive one risk because they advert to a different risk—the risk that by failing to inquire before acting they will fail to uncover evidence of the risk that they do, in the end, actually fail to perceive. Negligence is epistemic recklessness, the culpable disregard of the risk of inadvertently performing a risky action. Though negligence, like recklessness, involves advertence to risk, it constitutes a distinct form of mens rea because it regulates a different aspect of conduct—the decision to inquire rather than the decision to act. And because omitting inquiry creates only a risk of a risk, negligence is systematically less risky than recklessness, and therefore less culpable. (shrink)

This dissertation offers an account of the role of integrity in our agency. I argue that the unification of our actions, commitments, intentions, and other facets agency into a coherent whole is essential for our self-governance: our ability to be the authors of our own lives and to act in ways that reflect what we stand for. When we are fragmented – when our commitments conflict, or we otherwise fail to live up to what they require of us – we (...) experience inner conflicts that hinder our ability to be self-governing. However, integrity is not the only thing that matters for our agency. Throughout the dissertation, I remain sensitive to the limits of integrity’s value, as well as to ways that non-ideal circumstances prevent many people from integrating their agency. (shrink)

Science and mathematics continually change in their tools, methods, and concepts. Many of these changes are not just modifications but progress---steps to be admired. But what constitutes progress? This dissertation addresses one central source of intellectual advancement in both disciplines: reformulating a problem-solving plan into a new, logically compatible one. For short, I call these cases of compatible problem-solving plans "reformulations." Two aspects of reformulations are puzzling. First, reformulating is often unnecessary. Given that we could already solve a problem using (...) an older formulation, what do we gain by reformulating? Second, some reformulations are genuinely trivial or insignificant. Merely replacing one symbol with another does not lead to intellectual progress. What distinguishes significant reformulations from trivial ones? According to what I call "conceptualism" (or "conceptual empiricism"), reformulations are intellectually significant when they provide a different plan for solving problems. Significant reformulations provide inferentially different routes to the same solution. In contrast, trivial reformulations provide exactly the same problem-solving plans, and hence they do not change our understanding. This answers the second question about what distinguishes trivial from significant reformulations. However, the first question remains: what makes a new way of solving an old problem valuable? Here, a bevy of practical considerations come to mind: one formulation might be faster, less complicated, or use more familiar concepts. According to "instrumentalism," these practical benefits are all there is to reformulating. Some reformulations are simply more instrumentally valuable for meeting the aims of science than others. At another extreme, "fundamentalism" contends that a reformulation is valuable when it provides a more fundamental description of reality. According to this view, some reformulations directly contribute to the metaphysical aim of carving reality at its joints. Conceptualism develops a middle ground between instrumentalism and fundamentalism, preserving their benefits without their costs. I argue that the epistemic value of significant reformulations does not reduce to either practical or metaphysical value. Reformulations are valuable because they are a constitutive part of problem-solving. Both science and mathematics aim at solving all possible problems within their respective domains. Meeting this aim requires being able to plan for any possible problem-solving context, and this requires reformulating. By reformulating, we clarify what we need to know to solve problems. Still, one might wonder whether the value of reformulations requires underlying differences in explanatory power. According to "explanationism," a reformulation is valuable only when it provides a better explanation. Explanationism stands as a rival middle ground position to my own. However, it faces numerous counterexamples. In many cases, two reformulations provide the same explanation while nonetheless providing different ways of understanding a phenomenon. Hence, reformulating can be valuable even when neither formulation is more explanatory. Methodologically, I draw on a variety of case studies to support my account of reformulation. These range from classical mechanics to quantum chemistry, along with examples from mathematics. Symmetry arguments provide a paradigmatic example: the mathematics of symmetry groups radically recasts quantum mechanics and quantum chemistry. Nevertheless, elementary approaches exist that eschew this additional mathematical apparatus, solving problems in a more tedious but less mathematically-demanding manner. Further examples include reformulations of quantum field theory, Arabic vs. Roman numerals, and Fermat's little theorem in number theory. In each case, my account identifies how reformulations change and improve our understanding of science and mathematics. (shrink)

Understanding demonism in Socratic terms, scholars take antebellum American demonology to mean personal identification with an apophatic process that undoes empirical differences to reveal a single, monolithic identity. Against this dialectical orientation, my dissertation, Ecstatic Empiricism: Demonism without Despair in American Literature, uncovers an alternative demonological tradition in the context of American literature, a tradition that embraces what is irreducibly plural about sensuous life. Building on archival discoveries, Ecstatic Empiricism debuts Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiography in the intellectual formation of (...) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, who each read the volume and comment on its concept of the demonic as enabling ecological experience. Through both close and contextually dense study of the writings of Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Melville, I track a strain of demonism that celebrates the revelatory power arising from episodes of sensory and material meltdown, whereby all that was interior gets externalized, and experience moves from a subjective to an impersonal register. Thoreau’s famous Mount Katahdin epiphany, where “Demonic Nature” disperses him into agitated matter, is one clear instance of this pattern. Another irruption of “demonism in the world” occurs as the workings of Melville’s whale make all that is not just incompatible but mutually exclusive in life collide, shattering—or releasing—Ishmael’s humanity. Drawing on a set of post-humanist frameworks, I argue that the demonological tradition I uncover constitutes a historically specific and momentous attempt to replace a normatively centrist account of the human with a vision of radical and impersonal dispersion. By their demonism, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Melville reject the dilemma of fragmentary existence. Instead, they affirm and embrace the tragic conditions of life through the ek-stasis—the standing outside of oneself—that demonism brings forth. (shrink)

This dissertation tracks contemporary appeals to and uses of standpoint theory in an archive of popular late-20th-and-21st-century literary works, memoirs, museum exhibits, and public artworks that have been taken up as touchstone objects in contemporary conversations about interracial communication. Focusing on social media, blog, newspaper, and comments-section reactions to these works, I analyze the ways in which knowledge generated from creators’ standpoints is offered to audiences and the subsequent ways in which particular audiences respond to these invitations with attempts at (...) identification. I argue that responses to these cultural artifacts, specifically, and contemporary racial justice conversations, more generally, tend to rely on standpoint theory and on the evidence of lived experiences as a way to unearth marginalized experiences and make ethical appeals to their audiences. While speaking from one’s standpoint may provide an important way to explore and validate experiences long ignored by our American institutions, I contend that doing so can also inhibit the cross-racial dialogue that I view as central to any serious attempt at building antiracist consciousness and communities. In particular, I analyze Dana Schutz’s painting, Open Casket (2016); Kara Walker’s art installation, A Subtlety (2014); Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014); James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” (1962); Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015); and an interactive video game exhibit at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I highlight questions of identification and perspective taking, uses of a second-person “you” address, and objects that encourage imaginative role play—all of which invite audiences to imagine themselves in vastly different subject positions and, frequently, to center their own experiences in these explorations. Engaging with theories of identification and the resurgence of standpoint epistemology, I argue that textual and artistic strategies that encourage imaginative engagement with others unlike the self puts audiences in a valuable position to learn about others’ experiences. At the same time, however, these strategies constrain opportunities for dialogic engagement with others’ experiences when the experiences themselves are treated as unassailable truth rather than as entry points into a historico-cultural moment or conversation, and preventing engagement, as difference becomes sedimented as naturalized and unbridgeable. These standpoint testimonies also constrain opportunities for cross-racial dialogue when they encourage monolithic conceptions of identity that flatten differences among individuals within racial or intersectional identity-based groups. Ultimately, I hope to accomplish three goals: 1) to assess, with an eye toward affordances and limitations, extant, socially prominent ways of engaging with Black art, with particular attention to intercultural interactions; 2) to illustrate how these methods shape and are shaped by currently available political responses to injustice; and 3) to encourage more dialogic modes of interaction across difference. Taking seriously the cultural objects that call their audiences in and have thus become major touchstones in current racial debates, I seek to contribute to the fields of Rhetoric and Pedagogy, in addition to African American literary and cultural studies, by illuminating possibilities for imagining varied futures and models for anti-racist work and social change and by elucidating how art makes possible new lives, affinities, and communities. (shrink)

In this essay, I reflect on the intellectual influences that led to the genesis of the Social Psychology of Organizing and assess the way forward. I stress that the Social Psychology aspired to provide an outline of an organizational epistemology. I particularly focus on the interplay between experience and understanding, highlighting the following features: self‐validating prophecy, partiality toward similarity, ambivalence between belief and doubt, and understanding as ongoing accomplishment. I conclude with a discussion of the three papers published in this (...) Special issue. (shrink)

Ethnographers of clinical rationality often assume that the goal of biomedical practice is to eliminate uncertainty to produce definitive diagnoses. In this ethnography of an academic cardiac intensive care unit in the United States, bodies are conceived instead as ever‐changing constellations of problems that make diagnostic certainty irrelevant and require clinicians to construct and reconstruct temporary models to facilitate action. They suspend their uncertainty to “convince themselves” enough to “make moves” on patients, driven by the relentless tempo of critical illness. (...) This necessitates a practice‐oriented model of professional rationality that can account for the flow of time, with implications beyond the biomedical. (shrink)

The relationship between fault tolerance and performance is explored for [beta]-networks used as interconnection networks in multicomputer systems. The networks of interest are composed of 2 x 2 switches and are represented by a graph model called a [beta]-graph. Two parameters derived from [beta]-graphs are used to characterize [beta]-networks. The fault tolerance parameter is the maximum number of [beta]-element faults that can be tolerated. The communication delay parameter, representing the worst-case delay between any pair of computers, is used as a (...) measure of the performance of the [beta]-networks. Tight bounds for both FT and CD parameters are derived. Two important classes of [beta]-networks are introduced, namely, DPR-networks and MISE-networks. It is shown that DPR-networks possess the maximal fault tolerance, and the class of DPR-networks is unique in achieving the maximum possible fault tolerance. The class of MISE-networks is minimally fault tolerant, but has the minimum communication delay. A class of [beta]-networks, called RDTT-networks, that achieve an optimal balance of the FT and CD parameters is also presented. (shrink)

The combined effect of increasing problem complexity and growing demand for participation in decisions has forced policymaking and decision making in organizations to become less an analytic endeavor and more a process of "knowledge management ' This requires an intermediarv to mediate among conflicting perspectives and integrate the different forms and levels of knowledge This article describes one such approach to knowledge management that utilizes a third party to create and facilitate a temporary task organization Following a brief case example, (...) some research resultsfrom an evaluation of six past applications of the approach are presented These results provide insight into the effective structuring and conduct of knowledge management procedures. (shrink)

The performance of multiple-bus interconnection networks for multiprocessor systems is analyzed, taking into account conflict arising from memory and bus interference. A discrete stochastic model of bandwidth is presented for systems in which each memory is connected either to all the buses or to a subset of the available buses. The effects of the assumptions made concerning independence among requests for different memories and resubmission of blocked requests are investigated systematically. The basic bandwidth model is extended to account for spatial (...) dependence, and compared to previously proposed models. Finally, the various analytic models are shown to be in close agreement with simulation results. (shrink)

Bridges to the Past: Orientation, Materiality, and Participatory Reading in Late Medieval England explores the value that Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological theorization of “orientation” holds for thinking about the kinds of participatory, embodied, spatial, and temporal performances medieval texts invite through their material and textual appeals to embodied experience. Ahmed’s use of orientation to explore how and why some bodies are able to inhabit the world more comfortably than others offers an original vantage point from which to consider how readers might (...) experience material and literary forms differently based on their prior experiences in the world. Approaching medieval reading practices through the lens of orientation allows us to consider the significance of material and textual form(s) while at the same time attending to the diversity of readers and their bodies. Building on Ahmed’s work, each of this dissertation’s three central chapters consider a unique way in which the orientation(s) of medieval readers might have influenced their experience of a text. The first chapter, “Coming to the Table: Orientation and Participatory Reading in Wynkyn De Worde’s 1498 Sammelband of the Assembly of Gods and the Canterbury Tales” explores how Ahmed’s discussion of orientation’s relationship to comfort and “feeling at home” helps us to think about the reading experience suggested by British Library, BL G. 11587, a Wynkyn De Worde Sammelband in which Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is presented alongside the anonymous psychomachian dream vision the Assembly of Gods. De Worde’s repeated use of William Caxton’s “Pilgrims at the Table” woodcut throughout this Sammelband, I argue, facilitates a reading experience based on “(re-)orientation,” in which readers are invited to gradually habituate themselves to the codex over time, thus allowing the book to function as a “virtual” extension of domestic space. The second chapter, “Chaucer’s Narrators, Dullness, and Complexion Theory,” takes up the question of orientation as it applies to Chaucer’s embodied narrative personae, which a medieval audience would have likely recognized as humorally “phlegmatic.” Tracing the evolution of Chaucer’s embodied descriptions of his narrators from his early dream poems, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls to later dated works like “Envoy to Scogan,” “Complaint of Venus,” and Legend of Good Women, it proposes that the phlegmatic body offered Chaucer an authoritative grounds for his vicarious poetry about love, in which the craft and deception of the prototypical young sanguine lover/poet is replaced by the straightforward craft of the phlegmatic poet, imagined as absent of deceit due to the dulling of the senses that went along with that humoral profile. The third chapter, “Bridges to the Past: Noise, Materiality, and Performing Community in ‘The Bridges at Abingdon’,” considers the orienting potential of a literary “table” produced by a mercantile member of Abingdon’s religious guild The Brotherhood of the Holy Cross to memorialize the guild’s building of two bridges across the Thames. The table, which is sole witness to the fifteenth-century alliterative poem, “The Bridges at Abingdon,” scripts a public performance that nuances our current understanding of religious guilds’ relationship to discourses of “public voice” current in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century England. (shrink)

This is a dissertation about how the notion of metaphysical fundamentality can contribute to several outstanding problems in metaethics and elsewhere. It can, I argue, provide an adequate underpinning for the distinction between realist and irrealist theories, feature in a promising account of reference for realists, distinguish ordinary realist theories from quasi-realist Expressivism, and contribute to a defense of traditional non-naturalist views. By developing these fundamentality-based solutions, we also learn something about the notion of fundamentality itself; many of these solutions (...) are most naturally implemented in a setting where fundamentality is understood as a primitive degreed notion, not susceptible to definition in other terms. (shrink)

The goal of The Jackson Laboratory Neuroscience Mutagenesis Facility is to generate mouse models of human neurological disease. We describe three new models obtained from a three-generation screen for recessive mutations. Homozygous mutant mice from lines nmf2 and nmf5 exhibit hind limb paralysis and juvenile lethality. Homozygous nmf58 mice exhibit a less severe movement disorder that includes sustained dystonic postures. The mutations were mapped to the distal region of mouse Chromosome 15. Failure to complement a mutant allele of a positional (...) candidate gene, Scn8a, demonstrated that the mutations are new alleles of Scn8a. Missense mutations of evolutionarily conserved residues of the sodium channel were identified in the three lines, with the predicted amino acid substitutions N1370T, I1392F, and L1404H. These residues are located within the pore loop of domain 3 of sodium channel Na v 1.6. The lethal phenotypes suggest that the new alleles encode proteins with partial or complete loss of function. Several human disorders are caused by mutation in the pore loop of domain 3 of paralogous sodium channel genes. Line nmf5 contains a second, independent mutation in the rd13 locus that causes a reduction in cell number in the outer nuclear layer of the retina. rd13 was mapped to the distal 4 Mb of Chr 15. No coding or splice site mutations were detected in Pde1b, a candidate gene for rd13. The generation of three independent Scn8a mutations among 1100 tested G3 families demonstrates that the Scn8a locus is highly susceptible to ENU mutagenesis. The new alleles of Scn8a will be valuable for analysis of sodium channel physiology and disease. (shrink)

This dissertation develops, justifies, and examines the jurisprudential implications of a non-monotonic theory of common law legal reasoning. Legal rules seem to have exceptions but identifying all of them is difficult. This hinders attempts to formalize legal rules using classical logics. Non-monotonic logics allow defeasible inference, permitting rules that hold generally but can be defeated in the presence of exceptions. This ameliorates the problem of characterizing all exceptions to a rule, because exceptions can be added piecemeal while the rule remains. (...) The first portion of the dissertation rebuts a prominent criticism leveled at a large class of theories of legal reasoning that includes my theory. The charge is that no coherent theory can recognize both the difference between distinguishing and overruling, and the constraint of precedent. The critics argue that is more important than and that can only be explained by monotonic legal rules. Drawing on cognitive psychology as well as legal theory, I show that coherent theories, such as my own, can accommodate both and. The second chapter provides motivation for understanding precedential constraint in terms of non-monotonic default rules and introduces my positive theory, which elaborates on John Horty's work in treating legal rules as prioritized defaults involving reasons. I motivate and implement a relaxation of Horty's restrictions on the form of rules to allow a more fine-grained characterization of precedent. Finally, I explore the relationship between these relaxations and the concept of precedent. The final section explains how my theory fits into the traditional jurisprudential ecosystem. I demonstrate that, contrary to assertions in the legal theory literature, this non-monotonic approach is entirely compatible with positivism's commitment to extracting rules from authoritative legal sources, namely court opinions. I also suggest how it might be attractive to law and economics theorists, pragmatists, and followers of Dworkin. (shrink)

Commentators on John Broome's Tanner Lecture. The Tanner Lectures are a collection of educational and scientific discussions relating to human values. Conducted by leaders in their fields, the lectures are presented at prestigious educational facilities around the world.

My dissertation aims to disrupt an increasingly ubiquitous view of epistemology which claim that we can study rationality by considering a single belief at a single time. I target three areas where diachronic factors make a difference in the three sections: 1. memory, a system of tremendous importance in our cognitive lives yet which is often reduced to a one-sided question of whether to trust what one’s memory says, 2. learning, where I argue that we should sometimes believe in a (...) way that’s not warranted or reasonable in light of our current evidence, but which puts us in a better position to acquire evidence in the future, and 3. the connection between memory and learning, as exemplified in the case of remembering anomalous events. This project is important because our whole lives are organized around getting things right at the right time. When we try to act morally, we might try to have a life that is built around moral principles, or to become wiser and kinder over time, as opposed to amassing a collection of acts that all have independent moral value. I think the same thing is true of our endeavors to acquire knowledge the process of inquiry is not made up of individual, independent good inferences that happen to follow one another, but is instead about a trajectory where we learn over time, and take the right steps now to get things right in the future, and overall. So I think that to understand this more complete sense of inquiry, philosophy needs to make a place for memory, the system that sustains and directs inquiry in the background, over long periods of time even as the sciences are learning more and more about how natural memory systems work, philosophers have boxed it out of relevance. My methodology is to study natural and artificial learning and memory systems as a process of discovery, a way of using real-world cases as inspiration and guide to the normative landscape. Conversely, I hope that figuring out new normative possibilities can shed light on empirical facts - though this is not the main focus of my dissertation. (shrink)

There is a puzzle about Hume's is-ought gap involving an epistemic `ought'. From the premise `Snow is white,' we can infer `Sophia's belief that snow is white is correct.' `Snow is white' is paradigmatically non-normative, and that Sophia's belief is correct, a claim about what belief she ought to have, seems to be normative. The argument seems valid, so the is-ought gap is supposed to block this kind of inference. The puzzle is over whether we should give up on the (...) is-ought game or find another way to resolve the conflict. In the first chapter, I provide a formulation of the is-ought gap in a general semantic framework that avoids some other known problems. I turn in chapter 2 to discussing the puzzle about correct belief. I cast doubt on a solution proposed by Allan Gibbard by showing that it can admit of no epistemology of the normative. In chapter 3, I defend a solution to the puzzle while more directly tackling the question of the nature of oughts for belief. I offer a new explanation of why we ought to believe the truth. At the heart of the account is the idea that it's a conceptual truth beliefs ought to be true, which I provide a new argument for. I then claim that being an agent requires being subject to this norm of belief. This results in a non-moral, distinctly doxastic, account of why we ought to believe the truth. My conclusion is that asking why we ought to believe the truth is like asking why a bachelor must be unmarried: the answer is contained in the ideas that make up the question. In the final chapter, I respond to Gibbard's claim that an analogous story cannot work for `ought' claims for degreed belief. I pose a worry for Gibbard's proposed alternative explanation, and I undermine Gibbard's motivation for pursuing such an account in the first place. By taking belief to have an aim in a normative sense, I sketch how we can make sense of epistemic rationality in terms of that aim. (shrink)

This investigative study was formulated to determine the learning or changes involved in teachers’ thinking while adapting Reggio Emilia philosophy in their teaching practices in non-Italian cultures. The study focused on teachers and directors from Reggio-inspired early childhood programs from the city of Pune, India, and in Southeast and Central Michigan, United States. Both the Pune and MI group of educators have adapted the Reggio Emilia Approach, an educational approach from a third culture, that of Italy. The participants were interviewed (...) to gain insight on their understanding of the Reggio principles and the philosophy in their cultural context. The interviews were then transcribed, and the data was analyzed by comparing the similarities and differences across the teachers and directors within each culture, as well as cross-culturally. Results showed that to adapt the Reggio practices, teachers not only need to adapt the Reggio philosophical principles, they need to understand the underling concepts and values of reflection, collaboration, relationships, and reciprocity; moving from simply loving children to respecting them, the hundred languages, and importance of professional development in this progressive educational approach. The Reggio Emilia philosophy compels the educators to connect to their own cultures and communities when embarking on their journey to be Reggio-inspired. (shrink)

Courts established over a century ago that a corporation, like an individual, should be held criminally responsible for its misconduct. Nevertheless, the practice still faces steep resistance rooted in skeptical worries about both the possibility of, and the purpose behind, holding collectives accountable. My dissertation refutes both skeptical worries—and, in doing so, brings together diametrically opposed approaches to corporate regulation. Chapter I situates the project in its historical context. Regulation of commercial activity originally occurred through corporate law: states looked inside (...) the corporation to oversee its structure, purpose, and even day-to-day managerial decisions. The development of corporate-criminal liability reflects first corporate law’s inability to regulate sophisticated commercial entities and second the inadequacy of the conception of personhood this strategy presupposed. Chapter II draws on contemporary scholarship to offer a pragmatic conception of personhood, one consistent with the nascent conception courts developed to justify the expansion of criminal liability to corporations. On this account, corporations can satisfy stringent prerequisites for legal personhood—in particular, criminal law’s mens rea requirements. The second half of the dissertation reimagines corporate law as a tool for improving criminal punishment, rather than as a standalone, alternative approach to corporate regulation. Chapter III defends the use of criminal fines against complaints that fines merely harm innocent individuals, and further demonstrates that the State could better deter corporations while minimizing harm to innocents through corporate-law reforms that encourage those inside the corporation to voluntarily shift the distribution of harm towards culpable members. Chapter IV goes further to use corporate-law reform as punishment in and of itself. Among other things, standard objections to reform fall away when relocated from the ordinary commercial context to the rarefied space of criminal punishment. Meanwhile, corporate-reform-as-punishment expresses penological justifications traditionally inapplicable to corporations because of the lack of suitable alternatives to punishments like imprisonment. Incorporating corporate-law reform into our criminal practices thus expands the range of justifications for punishing corporations. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of evil, presented most fully in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, has been consistently misinterpreted since he first presented it. As a result, readers have taken it to be a mess of inconsistencies and eccentricities and so have tried to mine it for an insight or two, dismissed it altogether, or sought to explain how Kant could have gone so wrong. In this work, I provide an interpretation of Kant’s theory of evil that renders it (...) consistent and plausible. The main problem Kant tries to solve with his theory of evil is the problem of willful immorality: how can someone who sees her moral obligations as overridingly authoritative willingly (and so culpably) transgress them? Kant’s answer is that we do so by indulging various “moral fantasies” – ways of reconceiving the moral law or one’s status in relation to it. By entertaining, e.g., the fantasy that one is exempt from the moral law’s commands (“the exceptionalist fantasy”), or that one cannot live up to them (“despondency”), or that one need only to live up to society’s standards rather than moral demands (“the adequacy fantasy”) – one persuades oneself that the duty the moral law demands one to perform is only optional. Moral fantasies appeal only because of the presence, in everyone, of the “propensity to evil,” which makes the moral law’s commands seem less authoritative, thereby strengthening one’s sensuous desires. As a result, moral fantasies thereby diminish the urgency of moral obligations, and so tempt us to entertain them. Scholars of Kant have missed this explanation of wickedness because they have restricted their attention to the Religion, a work whose gnomic statements on evil are difficult to interpret when isolated from the larger context of Kant’s thinking. Assaying Kant’s thinking on immorality from the mid-1780s to the late 1790s shows that Kant’s main concern with evil was not so much its nature, but its very possibility. Evaluating the Religion in this context reveals it to be a fruitful resource for explaining the moral psychology of immorality, a problem we still deal with today, and that is possibly. (shrink)

Epistemologists frequently claim that the question “What should I believe?” demarcates the field of epistemology. This question is then compared to the question asked in ethics: “What should I do?” The question and the ensuing comparison, it is thought, specify both the content and the normativity at stake in epistemology. I argue that both of the assumptions embedded in this demarcation are problematic. By thinking of epistemology’s focal question in this light, first, we risk importing our assumptions about the epistemic (...) domain into our understanding of the nature and normativity of the belief state, and second, we come to have a false picture of the normativity that supposedly underlies the domain. In Chapter 1, “The Doxastic Account of the Epistemic”, I explore a range of views that assume there to be an essential connection between belief and truth. I look at views that treat all beliefs as attempts to believe the truth, views that consider belief’s biological function to be accurate representation, and views that hold that the very concept of belief is a normative concept. I go on to explore instrumentalist conceptions of belief’s truth connection and conduct an inquiry into the value of true belief. I conclude that neither the value of true belief nor an essential connection between belief and truth can explain epistemic normativity. In Chapter 2, “Evidential Exclusivity, Correctness, and the Nature of Belief” I note that epistemologists have recently argued that the best explanation for the apparent truth of a pair of claims - “Transparency” and “Exclusivity” – is that belief is subject to a standard of correctness such that a belief that p is correct if and only if p is true. I argue that the proposed explanation unduly privileges one part of belief’s full functional profile – its role in deliberation – and that a more complete consideration of belief’s role in cognition suggests an alternative explanation for Exclusivity and Transparency but denies belief’s standard of correctness. In Chapter 3, “Tradeoffs and Epistemic Value”, I look at a debate about whether epistemic norms are teleological. Though it’s standard to assume in keeping with teleology that certain goals or values explain the content of our norms, a collection of recent papers have aimed to show that this assumption can’t be correct because teleological norms countenance tradeoffs but epistemic norms don’t countenance tradeoffs. I note that the kind of non-teleological view that countenances no tradeoffs whatsoever is actually quite extreme and virtually unheard of in ethics. I go on to make the case that norms that license no tradeoffs can’t reasonably be taken to be grounded in value at all, and thus can’t be understood to give rise to necessary normativity. I conclude by suggesting that we broaden our conception of the epistemic domain to recognize teleological norms that provide recommendations for methods of inquiry or pursuit of significant truth or knowledge. (shrink)

In 'The duty to miscegenate', I harness John Stuart Mill's 19th century theory of social freedom to explain and to dismantle contemporary racialised and gendered injustice. In the first chapter—Social stigmatisation: 'a social tyranny'—I argue that persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women were, in the past, unjustly stigmatised by legal penalties against 'miscegenation' and are still, today, unjustly stigmatised by white male avoidance of cross-racial marriage and companionship. In the second chapter—Encounters that count: 'a foundation for solid friendship'—I argue that we can dismantle this (...) stigmatisation, by engaging in regular and frequent cross-racial commensality with persons racialised-and-gendered-as-black-women. In the third chapter—White right: 'a right to avoid'—I argue that, although we have a right to avoid commensal encounters with others, we do not have a right to avoid persons we racialise as black. On the contrary, we have a duty to encounter them, on terms of equality and intimacy. (shrink)

“Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Rhetoric of Assent” revisits the intellectual historical conditions that contributed to the widespread internalization of skepticism as an error-reduction strategy during the Enlightenment. To do so, it abandons a longstanding emphasis the special philosophical tradition of epistemological skepticism associated with the Scottish philosopher David Hume and pursues an alternative intellectual history of Enlightenment skepticism centered on the Anglophone tradition of “constructive skepticism” that informed not only Hume’s skeptical habits but those (...) of other influential Anglophone Enlightenment thinkers more often set in opposition to Hume. “Misreading Skepticism” draws on this tradition of constructive skepticism to generate a much different picture of the character of Enlightenment skepticism than the one extrapolated from radical Humean skepticism: one that is not anxious but assured, not theoretical but pragmatic, not preoccupied with the threat of “radical uncertainty” but resolved to attaining “moral certainty” sufficient to justify belief and action despite irreducible uncertainty. Readings of the philosophy of John Locke, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Dugald Stewart recover the broader Enlightenment project of practical rationality that encouraged the widespread internalization and instrumentalization of constructive skepticism. Readings of eighteenth-century rhetorical and legal treatises trace how this constructive skeptical ethos was disseminated beyond epistemology and embraced within a generalized theory of assent. “Misreading Skepticism” approaches this broader “misreading” in the modern intellectual history of skepticism through the special lens of Romantic literary studies, where scholars have traditionally framed the rise of British Romanticism as a response to a supposed epistemological “crisis” posed by Humean skepticism. “Misreading Skepticism” argues that, to understand the Romantic literary reaction to Enlightenment skepticism, we need to approach the intellectual history of British Romanticism not through Humean skepticism but through constructive skepticism. Readings of Romantic works by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and other authors demonstrate how these Romantic writers use literary form to interrogate the confident embrace of constructive skepticism within the Enlightenment as a means for managing uncertainty, often by dramatizing or thematizing elements of subjectivity and error that skepticism fails to detect or discipline. Drawing insight from the constructive skeptical tradition as well as Romantic literary critiques of that tradition, “Misreading Skepticism” develops a revisionary account of skepticism that attends to the rhetorical and social dimensions that complicate any epistemological account of skepticism. (shrink)

This dissertation explores how causal powers connect in Aristotle's system to Aristotelian causation, hylomorphism and the composition and nature of material objects, and possibility and necessity. I argue that active causal powers are efficient causes, explain what their causal activity consists in, and show how this is consistent with Aristotle's alternating identification of powers with form and with matter. I argue that the ``way of being'' that corresponds to powers, ``being in potentiality,'' should not be understood as being possible or (...) as a restriction of being possible; and I offer an alternative non-modal interpretation of the way of being. Nonetheless, I argue, Aristotle thinks of powers as the foundation and explanation of modality. This naturally gives rise to a conception of possibility where possibility is tied intimately to time. I finish by explaining how this conception of modality relates to some of Aristotle's notorious commitments with respect to that tie, especially his claim that every possibility is eventually realized and what is always true must be true. (shrink)