This dissertation is an in-depth theoretical endeavor that aims to build a new normative framework for media ethics by applying concepts from Confucian ethics. It contributes an alternative theoretical perspective outside of the Western paradigm with Confucianism, the most important philosophical underpinning in China and many other countries in the Eastern Asian cultural sphere. This dissertation presents three major components. First, it articulates the contemporary significance of Confucian ethics and its contribution to the field of media ethics as it searches (...) for a global framework. Second, it theorizes a Confucian approach to media ethics. It brings the ideas of virtue system, moral self-cultivation, and communal perspectives from Confucian ethics into media ethics, explaining the ethical underpinnings that they can provide for media practices. Third, it offers illustrations that apply each segment of the theory to journalism to demonstrate the practical implications of the theory. This project diversifies the field of media ethics, contributing a new perspective for global media ethics; it also enriches the field of media ethics in China by putting its own philosophical legacy to application. (shrink)

A genealogical continuity between Ralph Waldo Emerson and American pragmatism has been one of the most prominent narratives constructed by scholars of American intellectual history in recent decades. This dissertation unsettles this selective interpretation of American thought rooted in the optimistic spirit of Emerson in order to reveal a darker side of American philosophy better equipped to deal with the bleak reality of the contemporary United States. Amid the deep social and political crises of the present, it turns the story (...) of modern American thought away from Emerson’s affirmative philosophy in favor of the relentless criticism of existence pioneered by Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, a way of thinking that I claim, more than Emerson’s, nurtures the ameliorative impulse of pragmatism. To that end, I challenge the continuity of the Emerson-to-pragmatism story by showing how the critical pressure Melville and Dickinson applied to the Emersonian idea of an all-encompassing life to which human beings must conform marks a transition in American intellectual history from the mystical passivity of Emerson to the intelligent social control envisioned by pragmatism. (shrink)

Issues regarding scientific explanation have been of interest to philosophers from Pre-Socratic times. The notion of scientific explanation is of interest not only to philosophers, but also to science educators as is clearly evident in the emphasis given to K-12 students’ construction of explanations in current national science education reform efforts – the Next Generation Science Standards NGSS. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of research on conceptualizing explanation in science education. Scientific explanation seems to be ill-defined among researchers, science teachers (...) and, in turn, students. Guided by philosophical models of and approaches to explanation, this study proposed a framework – the Nature of Scientific Explanation – for assessing the type, nature and quality of scientific explanations. Furthermore, to establish the validity and usefulness of the NOSE framework, the study aimed to examine college freshman science students’, secondary science teachers’, and practicing scientists’ explanations, elucidate their perceptions of explanations and how they compare to the formal analytical NOSE framework and characterize the nature of the criteria that participant students, teachers, and scientists deploy when assessing the “validity” of explanations. The following research questions guided the study: How do college freshmen science students’, secondary science teachers’ and practicing scientists’ explanations fare when assessed using the NOSE framework? In other words, what is the nature and quality of participants’ scientific explanations when analyzed using the NOSE framework? How do college freshmen science students’, secondary science teachers’ and practicing scientists’ explanations of scientific phenomena compare and contrast when analyzed using the NOSE framework? What criteria do college freshmen science students, secondary science teachers, and practicing scientists use in judging the quality of scientific explanations? How are these criteria consistent among and/or different across the three groups? To what extent are freshmen science students’, secondary science teachers’ and practicing scientists’ views of the quality of scientific explanations aligned with those of NOSE framework? The study was exploratory in nature. In-depth, semi structured interviews served as the main instrument of data collection. In two separate interviews, participants first constructed explanations of everyday scientific phenomena and then provided feedback on the explanations constructed by other participants. Participants comprised three groups from a large, Midwestern University and neighboring communities: freshman college students, secondary science teachers, and practicing scientists. Each group comprised 10 participants. The study was conducted in two phases. First, during semi-structured individual interviews all participants generated explanations of various scientific phenomena. Interview transcripts were used to generate an explanation map for each participant following procedures of the NOSE framework developed in this study. During the second phase of the study, participants in each group assessed and provided feedback on the explanations generated during the first phase by other participants. The assignment of explanations to be examined was randomized and ensured that each participant assessed all four scenarios. This examination took place in the context of a second, semi-structured interview. All interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim for analysis. Data analysis comprised three phases. The first involved the construction of explanation maps from participant transcripts; analysis of maps and corresponding transcripts for emerging participant criteria; using the NOSE framework to generate a profile of participants’ types and quality of explanations articulated during the first interview; the explanation maps for each group of participants were examined to generate a full descriptive account or profile of these maps. This analysis resulted in three profiles, one each for the group of participants; and finally the profiles were compared and contrasted to make assertions regarding ways in which students, teachers, and scientists’ explanations were similar or different from NOSE framework analysis. The second phase focused on analyzing transcripts generated during the second interview to characterize participants’ perceptions of the nature of explanations, and derive the criteria deployed by members of the three groups to judge the “validity” or “goodness” of explanations. This resulted in individual profiles as to perceptions of the nature of explanations and criteria used to judge explanations. Profiles within each group of participants were analyzed for general patterns to generate a common set of criteria that each group used in their assessment, when applicable. These common sets were then compared and contrasted across the three groups. The third phase of data analysis focused on comparing and contrasting the sets of criteria derived from the second phase with those NOSE framework. Analysis in this third phase was more conceptual in nature and focused on how the three groups of participants fared in terms of explanation when their explanations were analyzed using NOSE framework. In general, major findings showed that, when analyzed using NOSE framework, participant scientists did significantly “better” than teachers and students. What is more, most participants across all three groups judged as “best” or “complete” or “good” the explanations made by participant scientists, even though group memberships of the explainers were held anonymous. In addition, scientists had more adequate scientific explanations, from a NOSE perspective, in the sense of providing more relevant and accurate structural elements. Analysis showed that participant explanation maps demonstrated similarities and differences across the three groups. Mainly, scientists’ explanations included more pieces of knowledge and lawlike statements, which were relevant and accurate and/or based on prior content knowledge compared to students’ and teachers’ explanations. Participants’ perceptions of explanations differed significantly. Students tended to think of explanation as a “true” answer to a why-question based on observations. However, teachers and scientists tended to perceive explanation as a testable and verifiable tool that provides understanding. More important were the criteria that participants used to assess explanations. Context-dependence and learner-dependence turned out to be two of the most important aspects of explanations considered by participants. In conclusion, the present study highlights the need articulated by many researchers in science education to understand additional aspects specific to scientific explanation. The study highlighted the importance of not only the structural elements that make up a scientific explanation, but also the connectedness of these elements within the context of teaching and learning. The present findings provide an initial framework for judging the validity of students’ and science teachers’ scientific explanations. (shrink)

In the "Metaphysics of Morals," Kant appears to claim that there is a category of duties to oneself, known as the duties to oneself as animal beings, that is based in the natural teleology of the natural appetites. Commentators, rightly puzzled by these claims, have said that any appeal to natural teleology would be inconsistent with Kant’s account of the ground of the moral law, and also with Kant’s understanding of human beings as autonomous. As such, the duties to oneself (...) as an animal being are typically given some sort of non-teleological explanation. I claim that such an explanation leads to conceptual and interpretive difficulties. In this dissertation I defend a teleological account of the duties to oneself as an animal being. I begin by explaining the duties to oneself as an animal being in the context of Kant’s moral psychology and his account of human nature. The duties to oneself as an animal being are properly understood as limiting one’s actions only in cases where one acts to satisfy a natural appetite. Kant’s understanding of natural appetite satisfaction, moreover, is teleological from the outset. The feeling of pleasure and displeasure, according to Kant, just is an awareness of some condition as agreeing or disagreeing with one’s life. Because natural appetite satisfaction is teleological from the beginning, Kant’s appeal to natural teleology in the account of the duties to oneself as an animal being does not involve the introduction of some external or heteronomous commitment. (shrink)

Recent progress in the field of cognitive science, specifically with respect to mathematical cognition, along with the turn in the philosophy of mathematics to a focus on mathematical practice, make for a great opportunity for interdisciplinary work that brings together the cognitive science of mathematics and philosophy of mathematics. This dissertation seeks to add to recent examples of such interdisciplinary work. I discuss three somewhat self-contained topics. In chapter two, I discuss some recent work in cognitive science on the topic (...) of mental representation and show how we can shed light on a puzzle in the philosophy of mathematics by applying it to the issue of the mental representation of mathematics. In chapter three, I discuss a couple theories of the cognitive psychology of deduction and why some recent work in the philosophy of mathematics on diagrammatic reasoning in Euclidian proofs shows those theories have some shortcomings. Finally, in chapter four, I discuss how we can get at the question of what makes a system of representation, e.g. numeral systems or formal languages, good for doing mathematics, by considering how the cognitive system uses such things in the course of doing mathematics. (shrink)

The relationship between nature and politics informs the tradition of Western political thought from its inception. In its modern formulation, this tradition generally opposes the domains of the natural and the political, characterizing the natural in terms of determinism or necessity and the political in terms of decision or freedom. In the context of the ecological crisis, my dissertation pursues a range of questions about how theorizing nature and politics in new and different ways allows us to revise core political (...) theoretical concepts like freedom, subjectivity, and normativity. In Chapters 1 and 2, I repurpose elements from the 19th-century German Idealist F. W. J. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie in order to lay the groundwork necessary to characterize nature in terms of an alternative process philosophy of nature I call transcalar ecology. Transcalar ecology lets us remap our conceptual landscape to allow categorial domains like freedom, subjectivity, and normativity to appear within nature, rather than in contraposition to nature. Similarly, Schelling’s own materialism emphasizes the dynamic of emergence as a material process that nature generates and sustains. Accordingly, I redescribe Schelling’s materialism in terms of what I call noir materialism, which reconstructs our understanding of matter in resolutely processual terms. As striking examples of this dynamic, I discuss film noir and dark matter. Ultimately, this provides me with an ontological toolkit useful for breaking away from the modern conception of matter as dead or static and the perceived downstream consequences of this for theories of the subject. In Chapter 3, I use Schelling’s philosophy of freedom and evil to illustrate how freedom in nature is possible. For Schelling, it is only in the domain of nature that freedom can take place, for freedom is an ontological power that takes shape as the creative agency of subjects. Freedom results from an ongoing existential decision between good and evil that ultimately issues forth ontological alterations in the order of things. Schelling defines evil as the willful identification of the subject with the entirety of existence. In this regard, Schelling’s definition of evil helps us recharacterize the ecological crisis as an ontological disorder. Foreclosing on evil opens up the possibility of reconsidering the relationship between nature and normativity, and redescribing freedom in this way allows the eventual reconciliation of nature and politics, at least conceptually. In Chapters 4 and 5, I propose a theory of the ecologically conditioned subject and explore some questions about the relationship between nature and normativity as such. In the former chapter, I develop at length the concept of companion ecologies – composite, multimodal phenomena that mosaically constitute the ecological conditions necessary for the emergence and individuation of embodied human subjects. To flesh out this concept further, I discuss architecture, the microbiome, and poststructuralist anthropology in the Amazonian context. In the latter chapter, I elaborate the groundwork of a new normative naturalism, or a theory of econormativity, which articulates an appeal to the normative implications of our irreducibly ecological condition. From the Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito’s work on biopolitics and immunitarian dynamics, I salvage a naturalistic conception of normative obligation capable of informing political judgment without introducing unwanted elements of coercion. (shrink)

This image represents the connections between the content and the process of my research. The topic of my research is alienation. In my dissertation I give an account of alienation that can encompass a variety of different philosophers' accounts of that phenomenon. The reading involved in research can frequently make me feel that my own contributions are buried beneath and insubstantial compared to other earlier work. In addition, this research is conducted in the context of graduate education at this university, (...) where low pay and insufficient medical insurance has led me to chronic financial precarity, which has, in turn, caused mental health issues. My own research is frequently also buried beneath the effects of these serious and unnecessary burdens which are added to the already considerable challenges of graduate research, burdens that weigh on me significantly and that affect many graduate students even more than they do myself. These burdens regularly give me occasion to reflect on the alienated nature of my employment here and of my own research into alienation. (shrink)

This article contrasts Paul Otlet’s epistemology of documents with that of Georges Bataille’s in the late 1920s and early 1930s in regard to the body parts that they assign as sites and analogues for documents. A double meaning to the notion of documents emerges, defensive and offensive of and to twentieth-century European scientific epistemology, morality, and aesthetics: documents as the full and truthful representation of reality, and documents as the material inscription of social, cultural, and physical affordances leading to the (...) reality of irrational drives. The brain as the site of the mind is said to be the physical location given to the former, and “the body” is the physical site given to the latter, reinforcing a traditional Western anatomical psychology determined by ideational and materialist ontologies and corresponding traditional bodily tropes for “reason” and “the senses.”. (shrink)

This study introduces a theoretical framework for play with which to explore notions of human embodiment, drawn from philosophical, theological, and theoretical works on play, ritual, and embodiment. In order to do this, I apply an understanding of play as a force that is a part of the world and its life and becoming. From such a view, the world is understood as constituted by a variety of relationships between objects, bodies, forces, people, entities, etc. that are all interconnected in (...) their existence. This opens up a complex web of interwoven relationships, full of “contradictions and ambiguities”, where it becomes difficult to distinguish one actor from another, or one agency from another. As such, I engage a notion of play that can be both light and dark, joyous and tragic, free and compulsory, creative and destructive: to be at play in the world is to transform and to be transformed. To structure this discussion, I introduce four ideas about play: play is constitutive of reality; play is contextually contingent; play is dynamically unstable, and play is agentially tense. Building from this play framework, I put forth the argument that to be embodied is to be “at play”, meaning caught up in that playful web of interrelationships that is the play of the world. To be a human is to be inextricably caught up in the dynamics of the world at play; it is simply unavoidable. Importantly, this embodied play necessarily involves negotiating the body as a potential agency or force itself that can act of its own accord, sometimes acting or embodying meanings against us. I explore the implications of this framing of embodiment, paying particular attention to the relationship between play, embodiment, human limitation, and meaning. I conclude with a discussion of the relevance of the framework of embodiment as play for the study of human embodiment, health, physical activity/exercise, disability, and, more broadly, the human condition. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue that truth-conditional semantics for vague predicates, combined with a Bayesian account of statistical inference incorporating knowledge of truth-conditions of utterances, generates false predictions regarding negations and metalinguistic inference. I thus propose a fundamentally probabilistic semantics for vagueness on which the meaning of a vague predicate is a likelihood function on the states it encodes, with these likelihoods being generated via reinforcement learning in a signaling game.

Philosophers and religious believers have commonly held that suffering is a basic feature of human existence, while responding to this problem in different ways. Philosophers have often tried to mitigate suffering in their own lives through the pursuit of knowledge, virtue, and autonomy, but with penetrating insight, Kierkegaard argues that this offers no real escape from their affliction. Rather than depend on one's own efforts or understanding to resolve suffering, one ought to turn to Christianity with faith that one will (...) attain salvation by receiving God's grace. In this study, I examine Kierkegaard's philosophical attempt to understand human suffering by analyzing his notion of despair, with the aim of determining why he thinks it should motivate the adoption of a religious way of life. He believes that a phenomenological investigation of human existence reveals that despair is central to our condition. In his view, it arises through the tension of being a free person situated in an impersonal world that operates coercively under principles of necessity, and thereby signifies our paradoxical nature as embodied spirits. Despair intensifies as our spiritual capacities of thought, imagination, and volition become realized over the course of our development. As freedom becomes realized, and we become more conscious of ourselves, we are likely to resist subordination to external forces beyond our control. Because freedom and the world that absorbs us are at odds, and both constitute us as human beings, despair is best understood as a state of disintegration in the person. Kierkegaard believes that to eliminate despair, the conflicting elements of our nature need to be harmonized so that integrity is achieved, but this is a paradoxical feat that cannot be accomplished without divine assistance. However, I challenge his claim that personal integrity requires religious faith, and argue that a person should be able to attain it on his own through an ethical way of life, which balances firmly held ideals and rational principles with concrete living. I also call into doubt his claim that despair is universal to humankind, and argue that he cannot consistently maintain that it is a state that the person brings upon himself through a misuse of will. His premises entail the disturbing conclusion that God brings it upon us in the process of creating us from nothing. (shrink)

Arms Control & Domestic and International Security.

Arms Control & Domestic and International Security.

Arms Control & Domestic and International Security.

Arms Control & Domestic and International Security.

Colonial Mexico was a land steeped in Marian devotion, both to invocations brought from Europe and those arising locally. Into this Marian Zodiac of New Spain, Madre Santísima de la Luz entered in the early 18th century, and her devotion swiftly proliferated. The cult and image of this Most Holy Mother serve as an excellent case study to examine certain contentions in the age of Enlightenment, because just at the beginning of the period of contention, she burst into view in (...) a blaze of light, proclaiming an alternate vision of a divine feminine, disciplined interiority, and knowledge as experience—alternate, that is, to the vision of enlightened reform and enlightened philosophy that was in process of taking root. In this dissertation, I examine these contentions of ideas and practices between what scholars have called traditional baroque devotion and both enlightened reform religiosity and the more radical enlightened philosophy. This examination is based on a study of the history, visual imagery, and iconography of Madre de la Luz; and of many texts, including devotionaries, treatises on mystical theology, artistic treatises, archival materials, council proceedings, and other resources. The areas of contention that I study are principally three: heterodoxy; interiority and exteriority; and epistemology. In each of these areas, the image and cult of Madre de la Luz offer serious challenges to an orthodoxy that is established or is in process of being established. With regard to heterodoxy, they provide an alternate view to particular Catholic dogmas and religious attitudes. The challenge is made through the divine feminine redemptive force, blurring dogmatic options and tolerating ambiguity, that Madre represents. With regard to interiority and exteriority, they provide an alternate view to the newly developing orthodoxy of enlightened reform, with its preference for states of interiority intended to serve external useful ends and for the new bounded self. This challenge is made through a valuation of interiority for its own sake, tolerating a fluid self. With regard to epistemology, they provide an alternate view to the newly developing orthodoxy of the enlightened epistemology of disengaged study that claims dominance over an epistemology of direct experience. This challenge is made by proclaiming the value of the epistemology of experience, while appreciating the enlightened epistemology. Through the study of these contentions, the dissertation makes a number of claims as part of the extended scholarly project that contrasts ideas from the baroque and enlightened eras. It proposes that both the enlightened reformers of the late 18th century and modern scholars have misunderstood the roles of interior and exterior practices in both baroque Catholicism and enlightened reform Catholicism; thereby suggesting that we need to free ourselves from a reliance on enlightened reformers’ judgments, and attend to the teacher-practitioners of baroque religion themselves. Its more careful study of baroque devotional texts on Madre de la Luz, has identified intense interiorizing practices promoted within a context of exterior practices; thereby suggesting that we need to not only re-evaluate our understanding of the two Catholicisms, but also how we conceive of interiority, exteriority, and their interrelation. The dissertation gives voice to proponents of baroque interiorizing religion, a voice that has been hitherto poorly heard in the scholarly literature; and thus offers a more nuanced view of baroque interiorizing religious practice. It elaborates connections between iconography and devotional practice. It presents a comparative metaphorology of baroque and Enlightenment visual images, expanding the work of earlier scholars’ Enlightenment metaphorologies. It contrasts baroque epistemology of experience versus enlightened epistemology of disengaged study. It expands cases of particular doctrinal heterodoxies to express challenges against wider orthodoxies. Finally, as an undercurrent, it suggests first, the value of studying other religious systems for understanding devotional religion in Mexico, and second, the importance of taking the researcher’s experience into account when doing historical research. (shrink)

This dissertation presents four studies on the mathematical education of engineering students. The first study is a qualitative analysis of the beliefs of engineering faculty at a single institution regarding what constitutes “mathematical maturity” for engineering students. Faculty emphasized the need for mathematical modeling skills, fluent symbolic representation skills, and a combination of effortless algebraic fluency and ability to use computational tools. The second study is an analysis of the beliefs of engineering faculty at a variety of institutions. These faculty (...) also emphasized modeling, representation, and computation, corroborating the results of the first study. The third study is an analysis of the mathematical content of engineering circuits and statics homework problems. Just 8% of statics problems and 20% of circuits problems use calculus, and in a much more limited way than what is taught in calculus. The fourth study presents a quantitative survey of engineering sophomores’ perceptions of the relevance of mathematics to their engineering studies. The students have somewhat favorable views of the relevance of mathematics, but some high-performing students view mathematics as irrelevant. (shrink)

Thesis in Political Science--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992.

Thesis in Comparative Literature--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1991.

Thesis in History--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992.

Thesis in Religious Studies--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993.

Fundamentalist Mormons believe in plural marriage, or polygamy. Many practice it. Polygamist groups live in insular settlements and in mainstream communities, mostly in the western United States and Canada. Polygamists often have large families, and they educate their children in a variety of settings: a public charter school within a polygamous town, private religious schools in suburban and rural areas, “priesthood schools” based on home school models, and in public schools in which polygamists’ children are invisible minorities. They trace their (...) origin to Mormons who refused to abandon polygamy after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced it in 1890. Polygamists model their economies, religion, and education on the “theodemocracy” of 19th century Utah. In the scriptural world view that they embrace, polygamists are a remnant people, entrusted with continuing plural marriage. The purpose of this study is to explore the educational component of fundamentalist Mormonism. Their schools transmit the values and practices of plural communities to children. What are these values? How do schools transmit them? Do they prepare students for participation in a pluralistic society? To explore these questions, I conducted field work at several polygamist communities’ schools and developed case studies about two of them, Spring Hill School and Link Academy. To understand these schools in their historical and religious contexts I examined the history of education and polygamy in Utah. The work of several philosophers of education helped me to explore themes of autonomy versus servitude and education for pluralism in polygamist communities’ schools and informed my recommendations for how the state and civil society should respond to fundamentalist Mormon education. (shrink)

We seem to experience a world abounding with events that exhibit dynamic temporal structure; birds flying, children laughing, rain dripping from an eave, melodies unfolding, etc. Seeing objects in motion, hearing and communicating with sound, and feeling oneself move are such common everyday experiences that one is unlikely to question whether humans are capable of perceiving temporal properties and relations. Despite appearing pre-theoretically uncontroversial, there are longstanding and contentious debates concerning the structure of such experience, how temporal perception works, and (...) even whether the perception of change, motion, and succession is possible. The overarching goal of my project is to develop a comprehensive model of temporal perception that does justice to the apparent phenomenology, explains how perception functions to represent temporally structured targets, and generates empirically-informed hypotheses for how such perception is neuro-cognitively realized. I also defend my model against the challenges of anti-realist competitors whom deny the possibility of perceiving temporal relations between non-simultaneous events. (shrink)

This thesis will argue for the potential for the use of Kierkegaardian philosophy as a tool of analysis in the field of Soviet studies demonstrated through the character analysis of select Soviet films. From Danish, existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s model of faith, presented in his follow-up to Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, I will use the model and its parts, which are steeped in existential and religious philosophy, and will connect them to the Soviet Union through the study of the historical (...) link and the philosophical link between them. They are historically connected through the link between Kierkegaard and early Soviet thinkers. The philosophical connection is discovered in the existence of the understanding of Communism as religion, which brings Soviet Communism to the religious realm of Kierkegaard’s World. With a connection between Kierkegaard and the Soviet Union firmly in place, it becomes possible to demonstrate the possibility of Kierkegaardian philosophy through the film analysis. I divide the analysis between the four parts of Kierkegaard’s model of faith. The ethical becomes reflected in Boris from The Cranes are Flying, Stalin from The Fall of Berlin, and Alyosha from Ballad of a Soldier. The aesthetic is found in the characters of Mark from The Cranes are Flying, Hitler from The Fall of Berlin, and Vadim from The Forty-First. The knight of resignation is found in Veronika from The Cranes are Flying and Maria from The Forty-First. And finally the knight of faith is found in Alyosha Ivanov from The Fall of Berlin and Klim from Tractor Drivers. By demonstrating the potential of Kierkegaardian analysis in these character studies, I show that Kierkegaard may have a future place in the field of Soviet studies after all. (shrink)

B.A. Thesis --University of Illinois, 1895.

Bound with: Triangular weirs / by T.S. Abbott.

D.M.A. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1965.

In what follows I argue for an epistemic bridge principle that allows us to move from real mathematics to ideal mathematics without losing anything that is characteristic of either methodological class. Mathematics is a collection of actions performed in the pursuit of mathematical understanding. The actions are the processes of proving claims that come in such forms as lemmas, theorems, or conjectures. These proofs can be accomplished through a variety of means including logical deduction, geometric intuition, diagramming, or computer assistance. (...) What is common to each of these is the characteristic of being convincing to a sound mathematical mind. Even though what in particular makes each of these methods of proof convincing differs, that they are convincing is enough to usher forth mathematical understanding. The chapters of this dissertation explore a new naturalistic metaphysics for under- standing “where mathematics comes from”, recent psychological findings in the the nature of mathematical reasoning, the concatenation of two historical forms of reasoning, the possibility of an epistemic bridge between real and ideal methods, and the implication of this new bridge principle for the long-standing concern that Go ̈del’s Incompleteness Theorems shake the foundation of modern mathematics. (shrink)

In this study I explore and develop a theory and ethic of hospitality through an instrumental case study of a middle school band program. I begin by presenting a poststructural view of hospitality founded primarily in the work of Jacques Derrida who maintained that, “Hospitality is not simply some region of ethics. It is ethicity itself, the whole and the principle of ethics”. Hospitality occurs as a host responds to or welcomes a guest who seeks entry into the host’s home. (...) There is a great deal of explanatory power within the hospitable exchange due to its metaphoric and ethical coherence with other interactions at all levels of culture and society, including those that occur within music classrooms. The best welcome is one that leads to the growth and flourishing of both host and guest, and a deeper understanding of their shared agency within the structures and spaces that shape their interaction. Music teachers do not welcome students into an actual home, but into robust and evolving forms of musical practice—such as school wind band. Practice is defined herein as a social activity that leads to the growth and flourishing of its practitioners as they collectively strive towards excellence in the unique outcomes of that activity. Practices are more than idle pastimes; they are a primary means through which human beings develop an understanding of what leads to a good life. Music teachers are thus ethical agents tasked with negotiating the norms of their chosen practice in order to ensure that all students have opportunity to grow and flourish in the way that only their practice allows. Hospitality offers ethical and pedagogic insight into the problems and potentials of such practices. I utilize the terms and affordances of hospitality as the epistemological, methodological, and analytic frameworks for a case study of the Eastside Middle School band program. I spent 33 days across the spring semester of 2016 getting to know the students and teachers at EMS. Data were generated through participant observation during classes and events, individual interviews with 31 students and all three teachers, focus groups with students and teachers, and by gathering key elements of material culture. Key insights include the complexity of structural forces that influence daily life, the wide ranging goods to which students gained access through participation, the intersectional nature of how students are welcomed into and through the program, and the disconnect between the stated ends of the practice and the goods and ends that were realized in students’ daily lives. I conclude that hospitality should be thought of not only as a poststructural ethic that privileges an unconditional welcome of the unknowable guest, but also as a tripartite Aristotelian virtue. The virtue of hospitality charts a middle way between a welcome that requires complete assimilation of the guest to the norms of the space, and a welcome that is so open that the structure of the practice itself dissolves and denies the guest access to the unique goods that only this practice could provide. Finally I utilize findings from the case study to suggest a pedagogy of hospitality for music education. (shrink)

What are we? Despite much discussion in historical and contemporary philosophy, we have not yet settled on an answer. A satisfactory personal ontology, an account of our metaphysical nature, will be informed by issues in the metaphysics of material objects. In the dissertation, I target two prominent materialist ontologies: animalism, the view that we are numerically identical to human organisms, and constitutionalism, the view that we are constituted by, but not identical to, human organisms. Because of the problems that arise (...) from endorsing these ontologies, I instead advance immaterialism, the view that we are essentially immaterial. In Chapter 2, I discuss how animalists must respond to a widely-discussed metaphysical puzzle, the problem of the many. This puzzle prompts some to endorse revisionary ontologies of material objects, and I argue that the animalist cannot appeal to these revisionary ontologies to solve the puzzle as it arises for personal ontology. In addition, solutions that don’t involve a commitment to revisionary ontology will be unavailable to the animalist: I argue that if animalists make use of non-revisionary solutions to the problem, they must abandon the most successful argument for their view. Absent their most successful argument, animalists will need to motivate the view in some other way. Some new arguments for animalism have been proposed, and I argue that they fail to give us reason to endorse animalism over competing ontologies. Without a strong argument, we should not prefer animalism over the other, more attractive, views. In Chapter 3, I show how constitutionalists face a different problem: explaining how the person is not the very same thing as the human organism, despite sharing the very same parts and occupying the very same physical space. We think that the person and the organism are different things because they have different modal profiles – the human organism can survive permanent loss of psychological life, but the person, presumably, cannot. Constitutionalists must then explain what grounds the difference in modal profiles, but such an explanation is hard to come by. This is an instance of the grounding problem, which is notoriously intractable. While the grounding problem is a well-known challenge to constitutional accounts of objects, I demonstrate that this puzzle is even more threatening when applied to persons. Some “solutions” to the problem fail to solve it at all, and solutions that might get the right result for ordinary objects require accepting that there are a multitude of persons where we ordinarily take there to be only one. We should not accept a personal ontology that requires a commitment to that multitude. I argue that the threat of the grounding problem is so great that we must reject the constitutionalist personal ontology. We will see from these puzzles in personal ontology that materialist solutions are either unsuccessful or yield unacceptable consequences. This should prompt us toward considering, instead, immaterialism. According to immaterialism, persons are not material objects, and the immaterialist can then provide solutions to the puzzles that threatened materialist ontologies. In Chapter 4, I outline these immaterialist solutions and show that the puzzles cannot be reinstantiated successfully against the immaterialist. I then discuss different available varieties of immaterialism and argue in defense of my preferred version. Ultimately, I argue that we are simple, immaterial entities that come into existence at the proper functioning of the brain. Endorsing this view of personal ontology permits us to adequately respond to metaphysical puzzles and retain judgments about persons that should be most important to us. In particular, the immaterialist has the resources to avoid the problem of too many thinkers and retain the judgment that there is exactly one person in circumstances where we take there to be just one. The immaterialist also has the resources to plausibly analyze thought experiments, such as cerebrum-swap cases, that threaten materialist ontologies. All things considered, it remains to be seen which personal ontology has the most evidence in its favor. In the context of debates that arise from material object metaphysics, however, evidence weighs in favor of immaterialism. Materialist personal ontologies are saddled with unacceptable responses to metaphysical puzzles, and endorsing materialism about persons requires taking on a very high cost: Either there are far more of us than we ordinarily take there to be, or there are no persons – far fewer of us than we ordinarily take there to be. Some might argue that these are the only acceptable options, so cost be damned. But we cannot afford to be so cavalier about our personal ontology. Instead, I advance immaterialist solutions to puzzles in personal ontology and propose that, in the interest of saving ourselves and everyone we love, we should seriously consider accounts according to which we are immaterial entities. (shrink)

Through the processes of globalization and industrialization, contemporary China is facing big problems of placelessness and pollution. As part of that, and for deep historical reasons, China is losing cultural confidence and identity. In the design of new landscapes, China has been superficially imitating western models, so that many cities in China now resemble each other and and have no clear local, regional, or national identity. Given these large problems, it has become necessary to rethink contemporary culture in China in (...) general and landscape architecture there specifically. To that end, the goal of this thesis is to discern and articulate a new approach to landscape architecture in China, one specific and meaningful to contemporary Chinese culture and that eschews superficial imitation of western examples. With that in mind, a broader goal of this thesis is to help rebuild culture confidence in China by reinterpreting its legacy of thousands of years of history and traditional culture. The method used in this thesis is to reinterpret the landscape tradition in literature and art in order to show the relevance of traditional practices to contemporary problems and concerns. Because landscape, poetry, and painting were complementary in traditional Chinese culture, and because all of those disciplines engaged with ideas of nature and philosophy, studying the traditional way of seeing nature in ancient literature and arts could help inform more meaningful approaches to contemporary landscape design. To that end, this thesis explores two fundamental philosophical systems in ancient China, Taoism and Confucianism, as well as historic, landscape-themed poems and paintings, in order to extract concepts pertinent to contemporary theory and practice of landscape architecture, such as ecology, sustainability, seclusion and boundary, and the experience of sequential viewing. Similarly, contemporary design projects are analyzed to show how traditional design principles are sometimes used by architects and landscape architects. Framing traditional and contemporary situations in those ways models continuity in the landscape culture of China. To reinforce that continuity, the thesis suggests several methods for translating traditional garden techniques into the contemporary theory and practice of landscape architecture in China. (shrink)

Librarians often object to Internet filters on the grounds that filters are prone to overblocking and underblocking. This argument implies that a significant problem with contemporary filters is that they are insufficiently fine-grained. In this article, we posit that present-day filters will always be conceptually capable of failure, regardless of how granular their content analysis becomes. This is because, we argue, objections to content are best understood as objections to problematic interactions between content and particular knowers. We import the concept (...) of the situated knower from feminist epistemology to capture the heterogeneous, socially embedded nature of patrons, about whom we cannot make blunt generalizations for filtering purposes. A successful filter would need information about these differently situated patrons, the content they seek, and the interactions between the two. We conclude that a genuinely successful Internet filter would therefore need to be both mind reading and fortune-telling. (shrink)

Thesis --University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1930.

Between 1960 and 1999, it was quite common for philosophers to rely almost completely on a priori methods to advance their arguments ; in a recent study by Knobe, the majority of papers sampled from this period used strictly a priori methods. In contrast, in the last decade and a half, many philosophers' strategy for making progress on philosophical questions has changed. Philosophers are now relying more heavily on empirical data—including running their own observational and experimental studies—in order to support (...) their arguments. Without a doubt, part of this shift was due to the rise of experimental philosophy – roughly a methodological approach to addressing philosophical questions wherein the researcher uses psychological methods to investigate the parameters that affect the deployment of philosophically significant concepts. This dissertation raises methodological problems with work in experimental philosophy and then proposes solutions to these problems. My focus in this dissertation is on two subfields in philosophy – epistemology and moral psychology – both of which have witnessed increased uses of psychological methods to investigate philosophical questions. (shrink)

This thesis attempts to provide deeper historical and theoretical grounding for sense-making, thereby illustrating its applicability to practical information seeking research. In Chapter One I trace the philosophical origins of Brenda Dervin’s theory known as “sense making,” reaching beyond current scholarship that locates the origins of sense-making in twentieth-century Phenomenology and Communication theory and find its rich ontological, epistemological, and etymological heritage that dates back to the Pre-Socratics. After exploring sense-making’s Greek roots, I examine sense-making’s philosophical undercurrents found in Hegel’s (...) Phenomenology of Spirit, where he also returns to the simplicity of the Greeks for his concept of sense. With Chapter Two I explore sense-making methodology and find, in light of the Greek and Hegelian dialectic, a dialogical bridge connecting sense-making’s theory with pragmatic uses. This bridge between Dervin’s situation and use occupies a distinct position in sense-making theory. Moreover, building upon Brenda Dervin’s model of sense-making, I use her metaphors of gap and bridge analogy to discuss the dialectic and dialogic components of sense making. The purpose of Chapter Three is pragmatic – to gain insight into the online information-seeking needs, experiences, and motivation of first-degree relatives of breast cancer survivors through the lens of sense-making. This research analyses four questions: 1) information-seeking behavior among FDRs of cancer survivors compared to survivors and to undiagnosed, non-related online cancer information seekers in the general population, 2) types of and places where information is sought, 3) barriers or gaps and satisfaction rates FDRs face in their cancer information quest, and 4) types and degrees of cancer information and resources FDRs want and use in their information search for themselves and other family members. An online survey instrument designed to investigate these questions was developed and pilot tested. Via an email communication, the Susan Love Breast Cancer Research Foundation distributed 322,000 invitations to its membership to complete the survey, and from March 24th to April 5th 10,692 women agreed to take the survey with 8,804 volunteers actually completing survey responses. Of the 8,804 surveys, 95% of FDRs have searched for cancer information online, and 84% of FDRs use the Internet as a sense-making tool for additional information they have received from doctors or nurses. FDRs report needing much more information than either survivors or family/friends in ten out of fifteen categories related to breast and ovarian cancer. When searching for cancer information online, FDRs also rank highest in several of sense-making’s emotional levels: uncertainty, confusion, frustration, doubt, and disappointment than do either survivors or friends and family. The sense-making process has existed in theory and praxis since the early Greeks. In applying sense–making’s theory to a contemporary problem, the survey reveals unaddressed situations and gaps of FDRs’ information search process. FDRs are a highly motivated group of online information seekers whose needs are largely unaddressed as a result of gaps in available online information targeted to address their specific needs. Since FDRs represent a quarter of the population, further research addressing their specific online information needs and experiences is necessary. (shrink)

The informational properties of biological systems are the subject of much debate and research. I present a general argument in favor of the existence and central importance of information in organisms, followed by a case study of the genetic code and the translation system from the perspective of information. The codon biases of 831 Bacteria and Archeae are analyzed and modeled as points in a 64-dimensional statistical space. The major results are that codon bias evolution does not follow canonical patterns, (...) and the use of coding space in organsims is a subset of the total possible coding space. These findings imply that codon bias is a unique adaptive mechanism that owes its existence to organisms' use of information in representing genes, and that there is a particularly biological character to the resulting biased coding and information use. (shrink)

This dissertation is a study of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of the concept of authenticity, and how that understanding may have changed over time, via a careful investigation of Heidegger’s written works, from Being and Time in the 1920s to works of the mid-1960s. This study has two goals. Narrowly, it argues that the key elements of Heidegger’s account of authenticity do not change over the period under consideration—while the nature of his elaboration shifts dramatically, the key content stays the same. (...) Broadly, since a fundamental change in the understanding of authenticity, especially how it relates to history and to human volition, is central in most interpretations that argue for a strong turn, or Kehre, in Heidegger’s later works, this study provides substantial evidence that there was not nearly as dramatic a shift in Heidegger’s views as many argue. Chapter 1 introduces the issue by discussing Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity in general, ways history and the active/passive dimension could relate to authenticity, the general outlines of strong interpretations in relation to these two issues, and what various interpreters who hold such interpretations argue. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine Heidegger’s views on authenticity, history, and the active/passive dimension, in roughly the 1920s, mid to late-1930s, and 1940s-1960s, respectively. Chapter 5 concludes, discussing in broad terms why strong interpretations of the Kehre are tempting even if misguided, and sketching a reading of the Kehre better suggested by the views argued for in this study. (shrink)

Information professionals manage, organize, preserve, create, design, implement, and control the information systems, services, goods, and devices that are both ubiquitous in and essential to our daily existence. But where there is great power, there is also great responsibility. Recent events suggest that information professionals may benefit from enhanced education and training to prepare them to respond to the ethical challenges they will encounter in their work in socially responsible ways. Improving information ethics education is one step toward beginning to (...) build a strong foundation in this space moving forward. Participants in this workshop will explore and identify key principles, tensions, and themes in the emerging field of information ethics and collaborate on the creation of an open model course syllabus. (shrink)

The project is an exploratory network analysis that examines a social movement of African-American women community activists in the attempted establishment of library branch facilities in a public housing community in 1960’s Chicago. The research elevates the activist groups’ efforts in the claiming of information needs for their community. It challenges the privileging of the administrative voice of library decision-making in an urban context, by situating the struggle in an African-American community. The network is created from thirty primary source documents (...) related the social movement. They include newspaper articles, annual reports from the Chicago Public Library, Chicago Public Library Board meeting minutes, and reports and documents from the local community center. The poster demonstrates the effectiveness of analyzing documents through the development of network in order to link relationships, understand the landscape of a social movement, and positioning the library through the lens of the community. (shrink)

We contrast assumptions of communications theorizing with those underlying information systems to emphasize that the convergence inherent in contemporary ecosystems of digital technologies, online services and the proliferation of information and communication technologies are bringing scholars from these two intellectual communities together while challenging their understanding of one-another’s scholarship. It is no wonder that the theory has been claimed and called both “Theory of Information” and at the same time by some, “Theory of Communication” by others. We look at that (...) difference from man perspective and draw the boundary between two communities. We believe the new emerging technologies have brought back both theories a back together; which we label and discuss as a reunion. We bring few examples to support our story. In short, this paper is the story of birth of two fields of studies from one theory, their separation over many decades and recent reunion of them with rise of new digital technologies. (shrink)

In this study, the use of user studies in information organization and a desired future direction can be visualized by investigating how user studies have been shaped in ISKO proceedings from 1990 to 2012. Also, the author suggested a holistic view of user in information system.

The rise of interest in online education from pedagogical, administrative, and technological perspectives presents numerous possibilities and challenges for researchers and practitioners, the most basic of which is the fundamental question of the determination of the concepts, categories, and values used to guide their work within this rapidly developing field. Drawing from contemporary discussions of the possibility for the instantiation of values and categories in the work of design, critical approaches to questions of technology and conceptual development surrounding the design (...) of technological systems are discussed. It is argued that current value driven approaches to technological design, when refined and considered through a logic of conceptual deconstruction, offer a broad and open basis from which the direction of online education can best be considered. In the formulation of such an approach, general lessons for interaction design and information science as a whole can be found. (shrink)

As the ability to meaningfully process increasingly large quantities of data has improved, the need for systems to support the aggregation and subsequent use of disparate smaller datasets is correspondingly greater. The GBIF is just one such project among a larger group seeking to aggregate the smaller, focused, and disparate sources of information generated for the work of science. GBIF is simultaneously an effort to coordinate and aggregate digital species occurrence data and digitize natural history collections into a single global-scale (...) resource for biodiversity work. The basis for this paper is a critical study of the GBIF database and data portal as a socio-technical system. (shrink)

Public libraries have been associated with a Habermasian public sphere, but articulations between public libraries and the public sphere remain undefined. To make fuller sense of the public sphere as it relates to public libraries, we used qualitative content analysis as a research methodology to study 12 Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh annual reports from 1900 to 2010. We identified 6 dimensions of the public sphere in public libraries: Core Criteria, Internal Public Sphere, External Public Sphere, Collect and Organize Discourse, Perform (...) Legitimation Processes, and Facilitate Discourse. Using the dimensions we found, we developed a model to explain how public libraries function as instruments of the public sphere. (shrink)

Both data-driven and human-centric methods have been used to better understand the scientific process. We describe a new framework called evidence-based discovery, to reconcile the gulf between the data-driven and human-centered approaches. Our goal is to provide a vision statement for how these approaches can be unified in order to better understand the complex-decision making that occurs when creating new knowledge. Despite the inevitable challenges, the combination of data and human-centric methods are required to understand, characterize, and ultimately accelerate science.

In this paper the problematic nature of use and appropriation of the language used for one set of purposes by those who have other purposes in mind will be discussed. The popular notions of paradigm and entropy are explored as one discipline seeks to borrow words, terms, and signs from other (frequently more mature and concrete disciplines. At times the original intention is salvaged, but frequently other meaning is substituted—deliberately or not—in the process of appropriation. There are examples of a (...) discipline adopting terms originating in another one, and the challenges that ensue. (shrink)

Information professionals describing resources are often faced with decisions around a resource’s formal identifying characteristics. Sometimes these characteristics, such as title or publication date, present information known to be deceptive, incorrect, or untrue in some way. Sometimes facts needed to identify the resource or help a user understand its nature are missing or incomplete. This paper identifies four ways resources fail to fully identify themselves, through unintentional error or inaccuracy; deception; simplifying complex reality; or humorous representation. It presents four categories (...) of response that an information professional such as a library cataloger might engage: correct or clarify; reveal the hidden, missing, or disguised; assist users in navigating and understanding complex realities; no action or response. Response categories are illustrated with instructions from rules and guidelines representing two centuries of Anglo-American cataloging rules. The conclusion stresses the importance of these responses in facilitating a successful user experience with information systems. (shrink)

Before the coherent internetworking protocol that enables the Internet today, machines called gateways ‘translated’ between dissimilar networks, at first in the early 1970s with great difficulty, and, by the early 1980s, comparatively seamlessly. This paper investigates some of the historical processes that drew multiple, formerly incompatible networks into a single logical network. Studying these processes can illustrate the Internet’s historical contingency -- and the labor that was required to overcome the social and technical differences governing the multiple, independent networks that (...) came to, and now comprise, the Internet. (shrink)

Early work in progress paper, reporting on questionnaire-based survey of students working with the new self-assessment professional development tool ) provided by the UK professional association. Discussion of the sociology of professionalization identifies Wilensky’s Process of Professionalization as a useful starting point for discussion. Provides historical overview of the association’s seminal involvement in the creation of Library and Information Studies as a discipline in the UK. Highlights the importance of the reflective practitioner within LIS education. The first in a series (...) of papers that will explore the implementation of the PKSB within the academic setting in the three-year period 2014-2017. (shrink)

I argue for three central theses: ‘intuition’ is ambiguous, in material object metaphysics ‘intuition’ refers to pre-theoretical beliefs, and these pre-theoretical beliefs are generated by an innate physical reasoning system. I begin by outlining the relevant background discussions on the nature of intuitions and their role in philosophy to motivate the need for a more careful investigation of the meaning of ‘intuition’ and the role of intuitions in specific sub-disciplines of philosophy. In chapters one and two I argue that ‘intuition’ (...) is ambiguous between an inflationary and deflationary sense. In the inflationary sense, ‘intuition’ refers to a priori intellectual seemings with a special phenomenology, conceptual etiology, and modal content. In the deflationary sense, ‘intuition’ refers to beliefs or inclinations to believe. In chapter three I specifically examine the use of intuitions in material object metaphysics and conclude that in this sub-community ‘intuition’ is used in the deflationary sense to refer to pre-theoretical beliefs. Drawing from research on infant cognition, in the final chapter I argue that intuitions regarding material object metaphysics are those judgments that arise from an innate physical reasoning system. Based on this empirical observation, I argue that metaphysicians ought to give preference to abstract intuitions over intuitions regarding concrete cases because these abstract intuitions reflect the innate structure of our physical reasoning mechanisms. (shrink)

This study examines the role of Greek philosophy, specifically the ethical doctrines of the Epicurean sect, in Horace’s satiric poetry. It endeavors to highlight the important influence of one of Horace’s contemporaries and neighbor in Italy, the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara. This is done through considerations of Horace’s self-portrayal as a qualified moralist who meets Epicurean standards and employs their tools of investigation and correction. A large portion of the study is dedicated to the manner in which (...) he incorporates Epicurean economic and social teachings as communicated and preserved by Philodemus, and to explaining the significance of this for his literary persona in the Sermones. (shrink)

This article is an initial exploration of possibilities opened up by considering trust relations as central to the teaching of history in schools. It is an extension of an investigation into epistemological problems to see whether ‘trust’ is a more fruitful concept to use than ‘truth’ in dealing with those problems and is based on an assumption that trust is more than a moral notion. In recent times, the mining industry has developed the concept of ‘a social license to operate’ (...) within a context of trust-based relations that complements legal, moral and contractual obligations. Three aspects of schooling are identified where this concept may be usefully applied; macro level, classroom level and the teaching of history. Applying this way of seeing to the teaching of history in schools may be more fruitful than some more standard views such as ‘transmission of important facts for citizenship’, ‘transmission of accepted judgments of professional historians’ or ‘empower the young to fight for social justice’. The nature of the particular social license to operate, in its context of trust-based relations, provides criteria for curriculum content selection, teaching methods and standards for assessment. (shrink)