Data science can contribute valuable predictions in diverse fields. But I write to express some concerns and red flags. I suggest that data science is being oversold. This article contains three questions that I believe data science must address as this new discipline matures. Is data science significantly different from statistics? This is a question that has haunted the field since the term first was introduced. By creating algorithms based on current societal decision rules that may be biased, even bigoted, (...) does data science lock in and exacerbate inequality? Scholars have identified a continuum from data to information to knowledge to wisdom, with the ultimate goal being wisdom. Data scientists seem to be acting as though data alone are enough. The big data systems are mathematically complex and have predictive power, but can data science contribute significantly to our body of knowledge? (shrink)

Hegel radically changed this idealist landscape by proposing a journey/movement based philosophy that remained presuppositionless, beginning simply by sparking our immediate concept of being. From his beginning there, he advocated for a system of philosophy that focused on the journey, but also gave an account of progress. Hegel claimed that contradictions within our concepts push them towards the absolute, despite us not necessarily knowing what the absolute is. His system begins with an account of how the concepts of being and (...) nothing immediately vanish into each other. The truth of their relationship, Hegel claims, is this movement, which he calls becoming. However in Zen Buddhism, contrary to Hegel, Nishida argues through his theory of basho that reality is actually conditioned by an absolute nothing that does not fall back into being like Hegel claims. The focus of my thesis is a defense of Hegel’s system from Nishida’s basho. I argue that Hegel’s argument on the ground and the grounded causes Nishida’s system to internally contradict itself on account of its hierarchical nature. This allows Hegel to rule out Nishida’s concept of nothing, and maintain the truth of becoming. (shrink)

This paper explores the concept of Buddhist inner peace by delving into the intricacies of attachment, desire, and suffering. It makes a metaphysical argument for the ultimate non-existence of the self, which informs inner peace as the superior good. Furthermore, it makes a juxtaposition with Nietzschean striving and his notion of will to power. Ultimately, inner peace is demonstrated to be the superior good given its amplificative properties.

Homeless women have been forgotten subject matter in the study and practice of feminist consciousness and consciousness-raising efforts. However, they grapple with the compounded challenges of both gender and homelessness within an oppressive societal structure. This thesis therefore seeks to conceptualize the consciousness of women, and particularly homeless women, in a feminist lens. Specifically, this thesis explores the Othering of women’s consciousness through the intellectual lineage of Simone de Beauvoir and Hegel, and emphasizes the role of material circumstances in shaping (...) consciousness-raising efforts. Then, this thesis examines two unique struggles faced by homeless women – survival sex and homeless motherhood. This thesis asserts that an oppressive gender structure has firmly entrenched women in an intrapsychic conflict, where the tension between their autonomous self and societal expectations of womanhood is exacerbated for homeless women. These individuals face the added burden of navigating the pressures of survival, often necessitating compromises on their independent consciousness for the sake of sustaining themselves. Finally, this thesis presents a preliminary framework for consciousness-raising among homeless women. It proposes structural changes and a consciousness of victimization to address the intricate interplay between gender norms and unique challenges faced by homeless women in pursuit of their self-realization. (shrink)

This paper aims to develop a strong account of recognition. It begins with a Hegel-inspired account of recognition as a fundamental desire that drives humanity. This account establishes recognition as fundamental to the initial subject formation of independent self-consciousnesses as agents. I offer the lord-bondsman dualism to provide a critique of domination as oppositional to securing the means for recognition. This entails that, as history progresses the world ought to move towards universally adopting mutual recognition relationships without domination. I adopt (...) this goal as an ideal form of recognition. In Chapter 2, I apply this recognitional framework to gender. Through analyzing four theories of gender, I find the recognition of identity has a significant role in shaping the self-consciousness’ self-determination. Recognitional dialogue can enable one to learn new parts of the self, but often forms of recognition dominate and constrain what identity can be. Thus, I explore three prominent methods of harmful recognition in Chapter 3: domination, intelligibility, and misrecognition. I view these harmful recognition methods as undermining mutual recognition relationships through examples such as recognizing deprecating self-images of minority groups and overwriting self-determinations through wrongful or lack of recognition. Despite these difficulties, I propose solutions such as an unintelligibility account which focuses on enabling mutual recognition relationships within group identities rather than society. In Chapter 4 I apply this robust recognitional framework to technology, which I understand as a locus for contemporary problems with recognition. I discuss technologies’ recognitional role as mirrors for humans, that often reflect yet threaten to replace us. I turn to understanding data as a technology that enables harmful recognition in the present day. I find technology is not neutral regarding recognition relationships, but can uphold mutual or harmful recognition depending on how it is used. With my account of recognition developed, I return to the goal of universally achieving mutual recognition relationships. I employ Halberstam’s account of failure to offer hope for achieving mutual recognition despite the many forms of harmful recognition. (shrink)

Within the literature of Standpoint Epistemology, there is a pervasive tendency to neglect to discuss whether a dominantly situated knower can achieve a standpoint of a social group they are not a part of. Emily Tilton argues that socially dominant individuals do not face strong, substantive limits on what they can know. If Emily Tilton is correct, the theses of Standpoint Epistemology that entail otherwise are implausible. The remaining theses within Standpoint Epistemology are applications of trivially true theses to issues (...) of social location and social marginalization. However, even though the plausible theses of Standpoint Epistemology are trivially true, the field itself is not. Standpoint epistemologists who neglect to discuss the controversial theses within the field often present arguments which do not require the truth of implausible theses. Despite being made of trivially true theses, Standpoint Epistemology is still responsible for interesting, important contributions. (shrink)

The goal of this thesis is to act as a defense of empathy in the face of critiques from both Jesse Prinz and Paul Bloom. They both hold the view that empathy is far too flawed to be held up in society the way that it is and that we should look to other strategies. We will look at their arguments against empathy and then move into the critique of them. Despite their arguments, and with other philosophers' input, I ultimately (...) conclude that with some edits to how we use it and some changes to how we think about it, empathy can remain an important and irreplaceable part of how we function in society. (shrink)

The Holocaust shook the core assumptions many held regarding human progress and human nature. This paper seeks to track how the ideas of modernist philosophers may have laid the fundamental political and moral assumptions that allowed the Holocaust to occur. I will offer an analysis of 20th century German-American political scientist and philosopher Eric Voegelin’s theory of Political Religions to assess whether philosophy emerging from the Modern era led Germany to eschew Christianity, a world-transcendent religion as the source of the (...) West’s “first principles,” and adopt the world-imminent religion of Nazism in its place. If this proves to be the case, with Nazism showing the problem of rights derived from the State, then Voegelin’s work can help us understand the shortcomings of modern thought through a novel philosophical and anthropological lens. (shrink)

Property law treats intellectual property (IP) differently than physical property. This paper draws upon John Locke’s labor mixing theory of property to explain why we have different moral expectations for IP. In particular, this paper aims to demonstrate that a Lockean account leads to the conclusion that intellectual property rights must be limited by a policy of expiration although we have no such expectations for physical property. In so doing, this paper begins with an explanation of Locke’s original justification for (...) physical property, conducts a modest exploration of what a Lockean theory of IP might look like, and ends by arguing that expiration is a way to reconcile the warring interests within such a theory of IP. In addition to labor mixing, Locke’s two restrictions of property acquisition, the enough and as good proviso and the waste condition, critically affect how we must balance the rights of original IP inventors, subsequent inventors, and the general public. (shrink)

I argue that there are (defeasible) in-principle epistemic advantages pre-consciousness raising to being marginalized. That is, by virtue of social location alone, marginalization confers epistemic advantages. According to a standard presentation of standpoint epistemology (Toole 2023), there is an inverse relationship between social situatedness and knowledge. That is, since the marginalized are socially disadvantaged, they have epistemic advantages. As a result, marginalization helps to gain access to these advantages. In this paper I argue for a stronger position. I argue that (...) unique features of the social ontology of marginalized social locations not only cultivate these advantages, but that marginalized social location alone can confer these advantages. My argument evades many of the critical contentions that plague standpoint epistemology such as the ability of non-marginalized to also gain epistemic advantages. The in-principle ­pre-consciousness raised epistemic advantages, I am concerned with do not preclude non-marginalized actors from gaining epistemic advantages. Further, while I consider important implications for deference, ultimately the epistemic advantages I argue for are not primarily concerned with deference. More importantly, they act as signposts to tell us where knowledge generation about marginalization should start, with the marginalized layperson. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue against Karen Frost-Arnold’s claim that internet anonymity has more epistemic benefit than epistemic harm for online communities. I will first outline her arguments that anonymity poses epistemic benefits for speakers of marginalized communities, who often rely on anonymity to share their experience and testimony without fear of repercussions, such as testimonial injustice, backlash, and even physical harm. I will then consider objections to Frost-Arnold’s account made by others, including the idea that anonymous testimony is (...) not reliable. I will show how this objection alone is insufficient against Frost-Arnold’s claim. Then, I will offer my own objections to Frost-Arnold’s argument, highlighting how she severely understates the physical harms that anonymity poses off of the internet, and how these physical harms lead to epistemic harm. I will also argue that transparency may make society on and off the internet more inclusive. Finally, I will consider counter-arguments to my own argument, and offer my replies. (shrink)

In an interview aired over the Public Broadcasting System in 1980, aircraft manufacturer John K. Northrop made a stunning charge. Referring to the Air Force's 1949 cancellation of his Flying Wing aircraft, Mr. Northrop alleged that the cancellation was not the result of any valid concerns about the aircraft itself, but rather was a retaliation for his refusal to agree to an improper demand by the Air Force. Specifically, Mr. Northrop charged that then-Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington ordered (...) him to merge his firm with Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Corporation, and that when he refused, an 88 million dollar contract for the Flying Wings was cancelled. Mr. Northrop also admitted that in 1949 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, he had perjured himself by denying that Mr. Symington had ever threatened or retaliated against Northrop Aircraft, Incorporated. This dissertation began as a study of ethics and decision- making in the military procurement process. However, in-depth research revealed no improprieties in the Air Force's Flying Wing acquisition program. Research techniques included careful study of voluminous Air Force records, most housed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, and at the Air Force Historical Research Center in Montgomery, Alabama. These documents, once secret but now declassified, showed that military decision- makers were never satisfied with the Northrop plane, and regularly made their position clear to Northrop. The author's document searches were augmented by a series of interviews held with as many of the surviving participants as possible: Senator Symington, who vehemently denied any impropriety; Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, then Commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), who readily admitted that he never wanted the Northrop plane and argued against it (and for the competing B-36 bomber) before a board of senior Air Force officers just before the cancellation; Gen. Lauris O. Norstad, the sole surviving member of that senior officer's board, who vigorously rejected any suggestion of improper behavior by Senator Symington in this or any other procurement decision. An interview with the current Chairman of the Board of Northrop corporation, Thomas V. Jones, generally supported Senator Symington, and clarified the stand of today's Northrop management. In addition, the author interviewed and corresponded with the two Air Force chief test pilots on the Flying Wing; both men gave valuable insights into the technical performance of the Northrop aircraft. If political manipulation was not the cause of the 1949 cancellation, what was? The research uncovered four factors that were involved. First was the substantial improvement in the competing B- 36, which made great strides in late 1948. Second was the assignment of General LeMay as SAC commander in October 1948; unlike his predecessor, General LeMay was a strong backer of the B-36, and was willing to give up other weapon systems (like the Flying Wings) to get more of the Consolidated-Vultee B-36s. Third was President Truman's cuts in the Fiscal Year 1950 defense budget, which caused the Air Force to not only defer the addition of eleven planned combat units, but also to eliminate eleven others (of a total of fifty-nine) already in existence. Finally, the shortcomings of the Flying Wing were certainly numerous and significant enough to argue against its production and procurement. After refuting a number of the allegations made in the 1980 broadcast, the dissertation concludes with some implicationsfor management. Chief among these is the need to maintain a marketing orientation, that is, the requirement to emphasize what the customer requires, rather than what the producer wants to build. The Flying Wing was Mr. Northrop's lifelong dream, and the author argues that its production was more related to what Mr. Northrop wanted to build than to what the Air Force needed to acquire. (shrink)

In order to maintain a structure of oppression that we still observe today with police shootings and premature death, theories of the “inferior” Black race and “superior” White race rest on the ideology of White supremacy. A unique and often overlooked premise of White supremacy is founded in the conception of the difference between a thing and a human. This thesis argues that the foundation of White supremacy is paradoxical in so far as it facilitates and perpetuates contradictions rooted in (...) the desire to reconcile an object/human duality to subjugate Black individuals. This view, on the one hand, assumes that the Black body can be conceived as and through an object, i.e., ontological reduction to the body, while also, on the other hand, identifying specific instances where a sense of human agency is attributed to Black people, but only to further subjugate them. To develop this argument, this paper will examine the contradictory nature of White Supremacy and Anti-Blackness, trace the historical formation of racialization, and outline how these structures impose burdens and inhumane limitations on the reproductive freedom and self-constructed identities of Black women. (shrink)

Because science as it exists today is a cultural construction of the West, studies of neuroscience have often been limited by Western perspectives. In particular, the Western proclivity towards individualism has led to a field of neuroscience which has historically focused on studying single individuals, as opposed to social or collective neuroscience. For the most part, it has just been assumed that collective phenomena such as interpersonal emotions must be able to be reduced in terms of individual phenomena such as (...) individual emotions. However, closer review reveals that interpersonal emotions have emergent properties that individual emotions alone do not account for. In other words, there is more to the emotions within interpersonal relationships than the simple transmission of individual emotions from one individual to another. Rather, there appear to be unique emotions associated with the abstract interpersonal relationships between individuals. These interpersonal emotions are neuroscientifically and qualitatively different from individual emotions. This could have huge ramifications for any field involving human interaction, from economics, to international relations, to mobilization for causes like climate change. In order to better understand these complex phenomena, a greater diversity of thought is needed in neuroscience. (shrink)

My major argument in this dissertation is that Hegelian spiritual subjectivity can and should serve as a philosophical basis for envisioning a new conception of human subjectivity for the age of globalization. Why, then, does globalization demand a new conception of human subjectivity at all? What constitutes the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity such that it is not only relevant and but also necessary to the contemporary, postmodern context of globalization? My dissertation largely addresses these two questions. As for the first question, (...) it requires my critical analysis of the context in which we are living. We are living in an era of globalization whose primary driving force is globalizing capitalism. Among many challenges posed by capitalist globalization today, I claim, it most importantly challenges us to reflect deeply upon the anthropological question of “what it means to be authentically human.” The human being that capitalist globalization is eager to promote and produce is none other than a faithful global consumer who, without critical thinking, simply succumbs to one’s sensuous inclinations or desires in their sheer particularity, contingency, and arbitrariness, who is easily attracted to the external appearances and sensible images of commodities endlessly released onto the market, and who thus is always ready to buy them both online and offline. And I suspect that this anthropology of capitalist globalization seems to be justified philosophically by the contemporary intellectual movement known as postmodernism, particularly by its thesis of the “death of the subject” which argues that human subjectivity is merely an after-effect of the pre-subjective, extrinsic processes of language, culture, power, ideology, the unconscious, etc. In other words, postmodernist anthropology (the death of the subject), regardless of its real intent, may function as a philosophical basis and ideological justification for capitalist globalization’s disgraceful reduction of human beings to mere consumers who are, without subjectivity, subjected to the imperialism of a globalizing market. And this erosion of human subjectivity is all the more serious given that the contemporary globalizing world imperatively calls for our more ethical and political thoughts, sensibilities, and actions than ever before to orient it toward peaceful co-existence and co-prosperity for all. In this regard, I insist that we need a new conception of human subjectivity for this postmodern context of globalization, which includes following three important elements in their internal relations: self-transcending drive toward universality, self-determined or autonomous action, and solidaristic relationship with others—that is, a sort of cosmopolitan or global citizen who is constantly universalizing oneself through self-transcending, self-determined ethico-political actions in solidarity with others to advance the common good for all members of the global community. I argue that this new perspective and conception of human subjectivity for the age of globalization finds its philosophical archetype par excellence in Hegel’s philosophy of subjectivity as spiritual subjectivity. Here my second question is addressed: What constitutes the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity? Historically, Hegel’s philosophy of spiritual subjectivity is his critical response to the so-called modern turn to the subject. In opposition to the post-Cartesian tendency to characterize subjectivity as a self-identical, self-sufficient substance, defining itself from itself without reference to things other than itself, which is already given once and for all, Hegel puts forth a developmental view on the human subject that could, in turn, transcend the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity operative in the modern project. Namely, for Hegel, the human subject must be conceived not just as a substance but essentially as a “spirit,” i.e., as a dialectical movement of being-for-itself (self-conscious identity with itself; substantiality) and being-for-others (socio-historical relation to others; relationality) toward the Absolute (absolute universality; telos). And I find paradigmatically in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit how such Hegelian spiritual subjectivity actually emerges and develops gradually—from subjectivity-in-itself (subjectivity in the womb) through subjectivity-for-itself (the birth of subjectivity) to subjectivity-in-and-for-itself (the growth of subjectivity with its ultimate culmination in absolute subjectivity). By “absolute subjectivity” here Hegel means precisely the final stage in which the implicit, immanent telos of human subjectivity that has been present throughout all developmental forms of human consciousness becomes explicit and fulfilled, namely, in which the human subject becomes fully broadened or universalized and sees all beings as intrinsically interrelated in their distinctive otherness. Importantly, according to Hegel, this can be made possible only when the human subject conceives of God as Absolute Spirit, as absolute universality per se and thereby conceives of all beings as self-expressive moments of God in his trinitarian movement. In short, the Hegelian spiritual subjectivity can be defined as the dialectical movement of its three constitutive moments, i.e., the Absolute or God as absolute universality (the immanent telos), self-conscious identity (being-for-itself), and concrete historical relatedness (being-for-others), each of which is homologous with the above-mentioned three constitutive elements of my proposed new conception of subjectivity for the age of globalization respectively, i.e., self-transcending drive toward universality, self-determined or autonomous action, and solidaristic relationship with others. It is in this sense that I argue the current context of globalization crucially needs as a new anthropological vision the Hegelian spiritual subject that intrinsically thinks, wills, and acts for something greater than itself as it constantly relates itself to others not in a monological way but in a dialectical way. (shrink)

“The medium is the message:” theological reflections on the idea that God is love. I am proposing that the idea of the self-revelational nature of God’s being functions, among other ways, rhetorically, such that the content of revelation (God’s love) determines the rhetorical mode of its communication (giving orders, inviting, begging, etc.). The three aspects of rhetoric that Kenneth Burke emphasizes in A Rhetoric of Motives—the use of identification, that it is addressed and, as such, is convincing (persuasive)—are examined in (...) terms of revelation. Chapter one seeks to clear the way for what is commonly understood as special revelation by arguing that theology does not argue for the existence of God; rather, what are mistakenly understood as arguments for existence in Anselm and Aquinas are actually arguments for fixing the referent of the term ‘God.’ The second step in the chapter is to then recognize the possibility of revelation (phenomenally) in discussion with Jean-Luc Marion. Chapter two will consider rhetoric as persuasive and intrinsically concerned with both form and content. The goal in this chapter is to show that rhetoric is an expression of a form of life. The role this plays in my larger argument is one of suggesting that, since in Christian theology revelation has to do with the living God, God Himself expresses the form of His life (Ch. 3). Two themes are in focus: 1) rhetoric as the art of persuasion will require an understanding of persuasion—what and how do we persuade? Formally, what is required? In expressing a form of life, one is always at least implicitly (unthematically) persuasive—it is an expression of an orientation and understanding of life and an invitation to the other to orient oneself in this way as well. As will be shown, persuasion, and thus rhetoric, are concerned with what is right, what is true, what is possible, and how to discover this together (relationally and intersubjectively). Therefore, I will seek to show that rhetoric as the art of persuasion (and thus about identification and address) is confessional, linguistic, contextual, and concerned with agency. Chapter three addresses the concept of revelation specifically and theologically and this is accomplished by exploring the concept of revelation, the trinity, and Christology in discussion with Karl Barth. I show how Barth’s Church Dogmatics are systematically concerned with the identification of form and content, and that they are likewise exhaustively rhetorical and hermeneutical. Eberhard Jüngel interprets this metaphysically, as an issue about thinkability and the being of God, interpreting the Christological and trinitarian moves as locating God in his coming. I attempt to replicate this move while building on his work; I want to push this understanding in a rhetorical direction and thus point to the ethical implications particularly in relation to love and witness. Chapter four seeks to clarify and understand what it means that God has revealed Himself as love, again in conversation with Barth, Jüngel, and Luther. Chapter five begins to consider the ethical implications of self-revelation as rhetoric in terms of the rhetoric of witness. The conclusion is that form and content are identical in God. The way that God communicates is identical with who God is. The revealing love of God is understood rhetorically as God’s self-revelation. As such, the content of God’s self-revelation, namely that God is love, must be communicated as love and thus lovingly. From this we understand that love creates freedom and freedom (can and should, in order to be free) acts in love—this is in fact how and what is to be understood from the resurrection, death, and life of Jesus Christ. The final thesis is that, because God’s self-revelation is rhetorical (an expression of the divine form of life), and He creates the new possibility of being in correspondence to Him, then our human witness to the work and act of God is also rhetorical (an expression of a new openness to that divine life). Importantly, it is a corresponding witness not simply when it is reported that God is love (content), but only when it is reported that God is love in a loving way (form). When there is a failure in the means of this communication, it is a least questionable if the content is the same. (shrink)

In the present dissertation, I examine, critically reflect on, and evaluate D. Z. Phillips’ view of philosophy, religious language, religious truth, and God. One of the focuses is given to his attempts to overcome the dichotomy between the view of religious language as fact-asserting (realist) and as attitude-expressive (anti-realist), and between the understanding of religious truth as propositional truth and as personal truth. However, my focus is not limited to that issue alone. I attempt to grasp Phillips’ view of religious (...) language, religious truth, and God as thoroughly as possible, since his view has been—too frequently—grossly misunderstood, and has attracted—often undue—criticisms from various sides. After that, on the basis of my understanding of Phillips, I make some suggestions for a more illuminating view of religious language, religious truth, and God. Phillips’ philosophical method, or way of doing philosophy is known as descriptive and contemplative. I examine central notions in his philosophy, such as description, contemplation, grammar, neutrality, and possibility. I also discuss scholarly debates on the relation between description and contemplation and the alleged shift in Phillips’ way of doing philosophy. In terms of religious language, Phillips’ several contentions are examined. He attempts to maintain the balance between the distinctiveness of religious language and its relation to other, non-religious aspects of human life. One of his central contentions regarding religious language is that the meaning of language is determined in the context of its use. For Phillips, the distinctiveness of religious language is shown in its specific characters, such as absolute (regulative), pictorial, grammatical, and expressive (confessional). While his view is often accused of attitude-expressivist, Phillips strongly rejects it. His position on the inexpressibility of God and the limits of human language and on the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical is also investigated. In regard to Phillips’ notion of religious truth, I explore its two major features. First, truth is context-dependent: not only the meaning but also the criteria of truth are to be found within the context in question. Second, religious truth is personal in the sense that it is a matter of personal decision and that it regulates a believer’s whole life. Despite the charge of relativism, his view does not necessarily lead to individualistic relativism, by virtue of the criteria of community and what we already know. Also, in terms of the charge of arbitrariness, Phillips’ account of our shared reactions to the world reveals not the arbitrariness but the contingency of our epistemic framework. For the reality of God, Phillips provides two kinds of analysis. First, in terms of the negative analysis—what the reality of God does not mean—he persistently emphasizes the difference between the reality of God and the reality of physical objects, and rejects metaphysical conceptions of God. Second, in terms of the positive analysis—what the reality of God does mean—Phillips argues that the existence of God is necessary existence; that God’s reality is synonymous with God’s divinity; and that the reality of God is spiritual reality. Also, Phillips rejects the charge of being Feuerbachian reductionist and attempts to go beyond the dichotomy between realism and nonrealism. The final chapter consists of two parts. In the first part, I address common criticisms of Phillips’ notion of the neutrality of contemplative philosophy. First, he has been criticized that despite his claim to neutrality, he is in reality a revisionist or a reformer who prescribes rather than describes. However, Wittgensteinian description, which Phillips employs, does have prescriptive force and thus the charge of revision or prescription could be less serious than is often thought. In terms of Phillips’ allegedly “one-sided diet,” I suggest, his Kierkegaardian-Weilian reading of Christianity needs not be taken as the grammar of religious beliefs; rather, Phillips offers it as an alternative account in his positive task of showing what religious belief does or may mean. Nevertheless, Phillips’ relying too much on that form of spirituality sometimes makes his accounts of religious beliefs less persuasive. Second, in terms of the question of whether neutrality is as attainable, desirable, or essential to philosophy as Phillips thinks it to be, his critics tend to take his notion of neutrality as a view from nowhere. However, I argue, the neutrality of contemplative philosophy is better understood as “trying to go nowhere.” Insofar as “a perch above the fray” of contemplative philosophy is construed as a third perspective from which a philosopher is looking for a way of describing the pros and cons of both the affirmation and the rejection of a position, contemplative philosophy is still a usable way of doing philosophy. In the second part, I suggest in what direction Phillips’ view can be further developed. First, a view of religious language based upon Phillips’ philosophy needs to involve more philosophical reflections on the structural inadequacies of human language, the ways in which language works in our talk of God, and, in this regard, the metaphorical character of religious language. Second, in terms of religious truth, I suggest two ways of deciding on the truth or rationality of a whole framework or worldview as such, despite the radical contingency of our epistemic framework: first, we can criticize or reject a framework by means of our context-internal criteria; second, the verification of the truth of a given worldview is experiential or practical. Finally, in terms of God, I argue that we need to pay more careful attention to and elucidate the grammar of the trinitarian conception of God, which is central to Christian religion. (shrink)

This study aims to clarify Aristotle’s practical reason and how his flexible but, nonetheless nonarbitrary ethical teaching works. By doing so, I hope to provide an alternative way of understanding practical reason in contradistinction to a modern view of practical reason and its assumptions about thinking through moral and political issues. In this dissertation, I argue that Aristotle’s discussion of practical reason shows that any attempts to formalize morality in the abstract are limited by the complexity of each particular situation, (...) the variability in perception/cognition of the agent as well as a human longing that is inextricably linked to practical reasoning. While Aristotelian practical reasoning is not a rule-bound morality, it is neither simply relative for it is guided by the concern for the noble through the education of the citizens as well as by the natural longing towards human excellence and beauty. I also argue that practical reasoning in the political context is uniquely challenging because it must always presuppose the demands of justice. Lastly, I conclude with the limitations of practical reasoning and how philosophy is indispensable in not only sharpening practical reason but also transcending its limitations. (shrink)

Genes are functional cell segments of DNA within an organism, as well as basic physical units of biological inheritance, which have consequences for human dignity and public interest. Genes and genetic material (DNA strands of nucleotides, genetically altered plants and animals e.g., see Appendix B) are patentable. In the US and around the globe, governments grant genetic patents for new, non-obvious, and useful gene inventions. A wide range of interest groups such as religious leaders, scientists, biotech pharmaceuticals, medical practitioners, health (...) care providers, venture capitalists, medical patients and persons have interests in defining what is subject to patents. Yet, it is at least questionable that genetic inventions, and the ownership of discoveries of gene mutations leading to possible diseases, should be subject to influence by interest groups. Although some genes (cDNA) are currently legally patentable, the question in this examination is whether gene patents should be legally and morally justified. In this work I examine whether gene patents should legally and morally be justified, given the principles of biomedical ethics such as human Beneficence /Autonomy and Justice. I argue that gene patenting is not justifiable, and I consider what can be done to create a system that delivers access to genetic information in the current genetic Intellectual Patent system. This interdisciplinary work is more complex than whether bio-science researchers and corporate entities should hold gene patents, or differentiating the legal question of whether genes are an invention or a discovery in the human genome. Mere responses to these questions would not ultimately solve the genetic justice problem. The justification for genetic appropriation is more complexity, since it is grounded in axiological claims about human dignity and public interest set in an ever changing biomedical/biogenetic technology. To address this complexity, I will draw upon the ideas of “the capability approach” to genetic justice found in the work of Nussbaum and Sen. This work is an interdisciplinary examination of the proper appropriation of natural genetic material and its impact on human dignity. It is argued that genetic material and information should be accessible to all, via heath care, for example. We must look to new ways to achieve genetic justice that promote human flourishing as a public good. (shrink)

There is some question about how to understand Thomas Aquinas’s five ways of demonstrating that God exists. Often philosophers and theologians portray Thomas as a strict Aristotelian rationalist with a strong emphasis on syllogistic epistemology. Against this view a competing existential, metaphysical, and theological understanding of the five ways has been gradually gaining ground, beginning in the early 20th century, due to the work of existential Thomists such as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Joseph Owen. This understanding has been expanded (...) more recently in the work of John Wippel and others. The rise of the existential view has led to the question of whether Thomas meant for the five ways to be strict epistemic proofs or whether they are instead a way to talk about God that presumes faith and metaphysics. This dissertation will present the five ways within a full range of contextual issues. These include epistemic, metaphysical, theological, historical, anthropological, and literary contexts. When all contexts are taken into account, the conclusion is that the ways are primarily metaphysical-theological yet they produce epistemic scientia resulting in knowledge that God exists. The five ways are primarily examples of how to properly talk about God in light of revelation, metaphysics, and the proper mode of the human knower, yet also syllogistic demonstrations that God exists. Such an understanding holds the potential to answer some of the arguments of the critics of the five ways, such as Anthony Kenny. Thomas shows himself to be thoroughly grounded in both faith and reason in such a way that there is a healthy balance between them that does proper justice to both faith and reason. The significance of this dissertation comes in two places. The first is the weaving together of a wide range of contextual interpretive factors that are not usually applied specifically and explicitly to the five ways in one unified work. The second is in the unification of the epistemic and theological interpretations of the ways, under a synthesis that accounts for both manners of interpreting the five ways. (shrink)

Spinoza’s doctrine of parallelism admits of certain observed inconsistencies that have long troubled Spinoza scholars. The scholarship over the last one hundred and thirty years or so has offered three dominant interpretations of Spinoza’s metaphysics as a result of the deficiencies with the doctrine of parallelism. These are 1) the subjective/objective distinction according to which the attribute of thought is understood as subjective and the attribute of extension is understood as objective, 2) materialism according to which the attribute of thought (...) is claimed to depend on the attribute of extension, and 3) idealism according to which the attribute of extension is claimed to depend on the attribute of thought. A tension between materialism and idealism is addressed by each of these approaches. And the question of Spinozist idealism is of great concern to contemporary Spinoza scholarship. However, none of these interpretations succeed as they each fail to properly locate Spinoza’s problems with parallelism in a deeper attribute problem. Interpretations 1 and 2 fail more severely for also clashing with other central themes of Spinoza’s project such as his ethics which prioritizes thought at the expense of extension. This dissertation observes that the interpretive trends in the literature not only do not succeed but cannot succeed as Spinoza’s system admits of certain contradictions. Of primary consideration, and beyond the problems with parallelism, conflation of attribute with substance and conflation of attribute with mode. It being the case that Spinoza’s theory of attributes is deficient, I propose a revisionist approach to what I have termed Spinoza’s “deep attribute problem” according to which the attributes are disassociated from the active/passive distinction. The active/passive distinction is shown to be instrumental in tying Spinoza’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics together as well as being erroneously applied to the attributes. The proposed revision is that the attributes be disassociated from the active/passive distinction which is to be understood now in terms of a vertical and horizontal association. The vertical association identifies substance-mode relations and the horizontal association identifies mode-mode relations. An important consequence of this revision is that substance is recast as absolutely infinite intellectual substance. As such, Spinoza’s revised system is ontological idealism and it is suggested but left for future research that the revision may entail un understanding of Spinoza’s system too as modal existentialism and ethical mysticism. (shrink)

Structuralist theories of properties state that properties are individuated by their nomological or causal roles. It has previously been suggested that structuralism is incompatible with robust conceptions of qualia. In this paper, I argue that structuralism should be taken as a theory of de re representation, and under this formulation it is able to accommodate qualia as intrinsic, introspectable properties of experiences. I then turn to various thought experiments used by qualia theorists to expand the notion of qualia, and find (...) the majority of these compatible with structuralism as well. I conclude that the structuralists and qualia theorists need not be at odds with each other. (shrink)

In order to judge how behavior caused by the positivity effect should be considered, comparisons were made between the positivity effect and two mental disorders. These disorders, Tourette’s syndrome and psychopathy, were selected due to their extreme differences in what Strawsonian attitudes they inspire and how they are perceived relative to disordered patients’ will. Disorder-affected behavior of Tourette’s patients inspires the objective attitude and is seen as a condition affecting an individual’s will, while disorder-affected behavior of psychopaths inspires the interpersonal (...) attitude and is seen as a character trait. Relevant distinctions between psychopathy and Tourette’s syndrome were found to include their neurological causes, the obviousness of the suffering they caused, and how easily their disorder-affected behavior could be mapped onto goal-seeking behavior. These considerations suggest the positivity effect should be viewed similarly to psychopathy in terms of responsibility, although this is complicated by its time of development and other factors. (shrink)

This is a personal account of an intersection of the schools of research in foundations of geometry founded by Alfred Tarski and Friedrich Bachmann. Their academic lineages and the origins of the schools are also described, as well as the mathematics that resulted from this intersection.

Traditional approaches to philosophical theories of tort law have systematically undermined the individual worth and security interests of women. However, torts also provide a particularly powerful avenue for reform, in that they embody the public power of private law and offer individuals the opportunity to seek recourse and accountability for wrongs. In this paper, I offer a framework for such reformist approaches to tort philosophy, predominantly inspired by Jean Hampton’s “Feminist Contractarianism,” which requires that women be recognized as individuals with (...) intrinsic worth who are deserving of respect. To accomplish this, I first note the particular relevance of social contract theory to tort philosophy, in the sense that both fields aim to establish and uphold fair terms of just and reasonable interaction among individuals. I then engage with the various deficiencies, both in classical social contract theory and in instrumentalist and non-instrumentalist theories of tort law, to adequately recognize women as individuals and to protect their corresponding security interests. I utilize scholarship by Martha Chamallas & Jennifer Wriggins to examine the relevance of these deficiencies in torts regarding domestic violence and sexual harassment cases, and assert that although non-instrumentalist theories provide the best framework for affirming individual worth, they have still historically failed to do so in the case of harms against women. Finally, I provide a framework for reform, based in respect for individual worth, dignity, and self-mastery consistent with the aims of non-instrumentalist approaches, that explicitly upholds protections for women – potentially with broader implications for other marginalized groups. (shrink)

Caste and gender oppression are two systems of domination that continue to affect the lives of lower-caste women living in India. Both the caste system and the patriarchy were created to rationalize a hierarchical division of labor in which lower-caste women are subordinated. The best way to understand the reasoning behind these systems of oppression, as well as the impact of them, is through an intersectional historical materialist perspective. This perspective can be utilized when analyzing the evolution of caste and (...) women’s rights in India, specifically focusing on the changes brought on by British Imperialism. This analysis reveals that decisions made by those in places of power – whether that be men, upper-caste individuals, or British imperialists – are made in an effort to preserve their modes of production and keep the set division of labor intact. In India, Dalit women find themselves at the intersection of caste and gender oppression, and thus, at the bottom of the hierarchical division of labor, being both of low-caste status (predominantly Untouchables) and women. The most effective way to improve Dalit women’s well-being is by improving their material conditions. In doing this, the division of labor is impacted and Dalit women gain greater agency, making them more capable of pursuing social and political change. (shrink)

Gianni Vattimo is often regarded as a purely negative, eliminativist thinker, defined by the weak thought that he articulated over the course of his storied career. Our temptation to read him in this way is encouraged, not only by an extensive and growing body of secondary literature in the Anglophone world, but by Vattimo’s own consistent focus on weakening as represent an alternative to the strong and violent metaphysical systems that have defined much of the philosophical legacy of the Christian (...) West. What often go unacknowledged, therefore, are the positive elements in Vattimo’s work. Indeed, weakening is, from the start, a politically motivated project, tied up in an effort to reduce (not to say eliminate) violence. This political motivation, in turn, is not merely about reduction but is instead tied to an ethico-aesthetic-religious complex, a vision of the world in which the barriers to community are broken down, in which the previously silenced might call for justice and organize against injustice, and in which we are no longer chained to the necessities of a harsh and repressive metaphysical order but are instead free to pursue voluntary associations in the spirit of love and charity. At stake in this alternative reading of Vattimo is, naturally enough, his utility as a social, political, and religious thinker and his resistance to the concern that his thought leads to a counterproductive quietism, at best, and to a destructive relativism, at worst. Once we have engaged with both the temptation to read Vattimo in a purely negative way and with the reasons to resist this temptation in favor of a more positive reading, it is important to reckon with the never-unproblematic character of the latter effort. Indeed, we cannot simply integrate the positive and negative moves we identify into a coherent and solid whole without reinstantiating the sort of totalizing and violent metaphysics that Vattimo critiques. Rather than succumbing to the temptation to seek such closure, we instead can recognize the (productive and interesting) tensions between the positive and negative elements in Vattimo’s thought and, in so doing, recognize that there is no radical escape from metaphysics or from violence offered here. Metaphysics is weakened, and yet persists, and violence is reduced and reconfigured, but not banished altogether. Part of the project of weakening, perhaps the most vital part, is precisely this willingness to occupy positions of discomfort or, put another way, a willingness to proceed speculatively and to take risks in confronting the problems that face our shared world. In the spirit of this sort of willingness to proceed speculatively, we advance, at last, to the final section of the work, which seeks to take Vattimo beyond his own limits. We examine, firstly, the implications of the positive reading of Vattimo for religious thought, putting Vattimo into discourse with his mentor Luigi Pareyson to examine what role religious institutions and religious practices have to play in a world defined by a weakened metaphysics. Proceeding from that particularity, we confront Vattimo’s own situatedness in a particular cultural position and attempt to address the question of the utility of his thought for cross-cultural discourse and, relatedly, for resistance to systems of oppression. Finally, we place our speculative reading of Vattimo’s thought into discourse with thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Catherine Keller, and Michael Marder to consider the implications weak thought holds for the discourse of the more-than-human world. (shrink)

Throughout its history, the evaluation field has developed numerous theories. These theories, or evaluation theory as they are collectively known, are integral to the knowledge of the discipline and represent the field’s collective understanding of how evaluation can and should be practiced. Yet, research suggests that the influence of evaluation theory on evaluation practice is minimal. This finding has left the field questioning what knowledge, if not evaluation theory, guides practitioners? Some theorists propose that evaluation practice is influenced by practical (...) knowledge, a diverse knowledge base inherent to the doing of evaluation. Practical knowledge is a blend of explicit procedural knowledge and tacit ways of knowing that inform practitioners’ perceptions and guide their practice. It is developed through practitioner’s interactions with and theorizing of practical problems as well as insights drawn from experience. Despite its perceived importance to evaluation practice, limited research has been conducted on practical knowledge in evaluation. Consequently, the field lacks an understanding of the underlying knowledge, or epistemology, of evaluation practice. The current study addressed this research gap by investigating practical knowledge in evaluation with a specific focus on the ways of knowing that underlie and guide practitioners. A multiple methods research design, consisting of two studies, was implemented. The first study used a convergent mixed methods design to analyze qualitative and quantitative data collected through document review (N=3) and the repertory grid technique (N=22). The findings presented a holistic epistemology of evaluation practice grounded in four inter-related ways of knowing: knowing self, knowing others, knowing the discipline, and knowing the common good and equity. Important insights into the underlying dimensions of the ways of knowing, including creative processes that actuate knowing (i.e., knowing in action) and methods evaluators use to express what has become known through their practice (i.e., expressions of knowing) were also interpreted from the findings. The second study examined how the epistemology of evaluation practice identified in the first study is integrated into graduate programs in evaluation. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with evaluation faculty (N=11) as well as alumni and advanced students (N=16) from six graduate programs in evaluation based in the United States. The findings suggest that the epistemology is reflected in the evaluation educational programs, albeit to varying degrees. Knowing the discipline was the most evident among the programs while knowing others and expressions of knowing were moderately evident. Knowing the common good and equity, knowing self, and knowing in action were less apparent, suggesting that these may be areas for further development. This research advances the scholarship on evaluation practice and provides valuable insights into the relationship between evaluation theory and practice. Additionally, the findings present a holistic representation of the epistemology of evaluation practice that challenges existing assumptions about how the field conceptualizes practice and knowledge construction. Last, the findings provide valuable information that can further professionalize evaluation by refining the field’s understanding of the unique nature of evaluation practice and informing evaluator education, reflective practice, and professional development. (shrink)

This short poem is inspired by Robert Langlands, recipient of the 2018 Abel Prize. The poem tries to sum up in poetic language, as brief but substantial as it can be, the philosophical and rhetorical connotation of his contributions to mathematics, from automorphic forms to number theory, and the famous Langlands programme, among others. Also partly inspired by Edward Frenkel's tribute to Langlands, the book Love and Mathematics, the poem seeks to capture the philosophical beauty of mathematics that privileges the (...) importance of 'functions' over 'passions', consistent with Langlands' purely mathematical side. (shrink)

Psychedelics have the power to induce in us an altered state of consciousness—a psychological experience radically different from our normal waking state of consciousness. Notable differences include changes in one’s perception of time, their sense of self, and the meaning and significance they attribute to things in their life. Across a broad range of testimonies, many people have reported characteristics of their psychedelic experience that bear a close resemblance to metaphysical accounts of ultimate reality from various cultures and time periods. (...) In this paper, I explore the question of whether one can acquire knowledge of ultimate reality through psychedelic experience. Using an application of Bertrand Russell’s knowledge by acquaintance argument, I demonstrate that one’s perceptual experience in the altered state of consciousness, in combination with post-experience reflection, provides justification for knowledge of ultimate reality. (shrink)

The U.S. law has a weak conception of the right to privacy– one that fails to adequately protect consumers in the technological age. This project draws primarily upon Locke, Kant, and Ripstein to articulate and apply a reorientation of the right to privacy and defend that reorientation as constitutionally sound. Specifically, Locke’s property theory and Kant’s innate right suggest that the right to privacy is derived from an exclusive right to control one’s person, which is one’s most fundamental property. In (...) applying this understanding of privacy, there is a case for a robust protection of consumer data. Further, Ripstein’s analysis of public provisions highlights that the state has a positive duty to secure the conditions for the effective exercise of the right to privacy. Doing so entails state regulation of what I argue are illegitimate business-to-consumer consent agreements. In short, this reorientation provides grounds for a protection and maintenance of a morally robust right to privacy in the technological age that can pass constitutional muster. (shrink)

In my paper, I thoroughly detail the characters, A and B, and their relationship to the double movement, despair, and actuality that appear in Kierkegaard’s works Either/Or and The Sickness Unto Death. I claim that the characters are not isolated characters, but two sides of one psychology in dialogue with each other. The realization of this makes the reading of Kierkegaard’s work more interesting and primes it for deeper engagement for the reader. The parallel of psychological concepts such as the (...) id, ego, and superego allows one to recognize the same dialogue that exists in their own inner life and connect more deeply to Kierkegaard’s task. I show how his religious upbringing and familiarity with tragedy inform his understanding of his own existential questions and provide my interpretation of his solution to the double movement as well as an attempt of my own. Kierkegaard advocates for the leap of faith based on his understanding of the eternal self created in God’s image, with a responsibility to embrace the task of strengthening the self in alignment with God and in rejection of sin and despair. I build on this by including the importance of love and the following passion. I agree that the “true self” cannot be known and it is essential to place your faith in something greater than yourself, such as love or God, to remain in an active relationship with the existential task of strengthening your self through choices. (shrink)

The American national identity is built upon a dream of assimilation commonly referred to as the American Dream. The American Dream speaks to and attracts millions of people from diverse backgrounds and cultures, seeking to assimilate into an identity that would fulfill a good life. Though many people have different interpretations of what defines a good life derived from the American Dream, it is generally associated with two key features: upward mobility and economic success. These features, as the American Dream (...) promises, are the key to obtaining a good life. Yet, for many Americans, these features are difficult to obtain and utilize because of contemporary issues that stem from a lack of equitable opportunities and a deep economic inequality in the United States. This paper will address the difficulties that many Americans face in their journey of assimilation due to contemporary issues that lead to challenges with the people and traits of themselves that they hold dearest. (shrink)

This dissertation provides a sustained theoretical articulation of core Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts situated within the standing difficulties in the practice and theory of museums. Drawing upon research gathered from site visits, informational interviews, textual analysis, and an extensive engagement with the seminars of Jacques Lacan, I enumerate here a first attempt at what a Lacanian theoretical formation can contribute to museum studies scholarship. Through this research this dissertation shows psychoanalysis to be especially useful for museum studies owing to how the (...) troubles immediately encountered in the everyday material practices of museological work are structurally analogous to the impossibilities experienced on the couch. This work is, additionally, performed with an eye sensitive to the ways in which the use of digital technology within museological spaces is increasingly imagined as the best means for solving, avoiding, or otherwise filling-in the lack, separation, or non-relation that exists between visitors and museums. Through the parallel analyses of a collage of examples curated from new media (virtual reality, 3d printing, videogames, augmented reality applications, and online streaming services) and the interrogation of existing theories within museum studies scholarship (such as participatory and Foucaultian theory) this research pursues a direct confrontation with how the extant theory of the museum cannot speak to what are the increasingly heightened contradictions emergent in the discourses determining museums.Rather than interpret obstacles in museological work as impediments to the successful transmission of knowledge between visitors and museums, I seek to show instead how these barriers are, according to a psychoanalytically informed museum studies, both the bedrock and the object-cause of all museological work. The ultimate goal of this dissertation is to provoke a desire for psychoanalytic theory among those working in museums and a desire for museum studies scholarship among those working in psychoanalysis and media studies. (shrink)

While some might consider epistolary novels of the long-eighteenth century as the sentimental purview of women readers, this research proposes that many of these epistolary novels serve as powerful markers in the gender wars of this era. While an overall sense of optimism pervaded Britain’s long-eighteenth century, people still grappled with foundational moral questions. These questions came to be addressed in increasingly secular ways by moral philosophy. As these philosophers occupied influential government, law, and publishing positions, their ideas and works (...) greatly influenced the public imagination. The publications of moral philosophers—such as John Locke, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Joseph Butler, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jeremy Bentham—sparked the imaginations of some of the era’s top epistolary novelists who dramatized their philosophical theories in fictional moral experiments. This project investigates how and why the novelists Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley literalized the dialectics of certain moral philosophers. This research asserts that the novelists adopted the structure of the three-stage moral dialectic found in moral sentiment theories and patterned their novels and their characters’ psychological processes to be a literalization of the moral-philosophical dialectics. As the novelists use the realist epistolary genre, they capture real-world settings and complex psychologies with startling accuracy, prompting interpretive questions regarding character ethics and credibility. Literary analysis reveals that the novelists designed fictional plotlines that facilitate inevitable moral dilemmas for the characters to contemplate and determine their moral actions. These plotlines and character dilemmas follow a three-stage moral dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. While no one to one pairing of novelist and moral philosopher is identified or argued for, the literary analysis reveals undeniable mutual influences and metatextual responses across the works chosen for this project. In the thesis stage, novelists have their characters literalize the philosopher’s process of contemplation. For example, Aphra Behn designs her characters to dramatize John Locke’s focus on applying experience-based knowledge in the process of refuting received social customs. This novelist-philosopher connection also appears in Samuel Richardson’s characters who emulate Shaftesburean principles when they depend upon their innate moral sense to ascertain the virtuous path in a precarious situation. After the contemplative thesis stage is played out, the novelists move to the antithesis stage, which expresses a state of skepticism wherein the characters are unwilling or unable to bridge the gap from moral knowledge to moral behavior. The novelists then dramatize the synthesis stage, which resolves the unstable condition of the antithesis state, through some external regulatory structure. The specifics of the resolution vary across the novels depending on which moral philosopher’s stance is adopted. For instance, Frances Burney’s warning novel of The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties (1814), literalizes the importance of everyone adhering to David Hume’s General Rule and of respecting class boundaries. This project uses narratology focused on diegetic framing levels and voice styles to analyze how the novelists shift first-person epistolary voices and third-person omniscient voices to convey their perspectives regarding the social benefits of living out these moral philosophies. Specifically, the novelists assert how the external regulatory structures impact women, eliciting praise or criticism from the various authors. In these designed fictional worlds, this research asserts that several novelists develop narrators who emulate a moral philosopher’s specific concept of an “imagined internal entity.” This entity functions as a self-reflexive tool for thinking and assessing a situation’s holistic moral implications and potential actions. For example, this entity refers to Shaftesbury’s “critical self,” Butler’s “conscience,” and Smith’s “Impartial Spectator.” This project ultimately asserts that the stage three synthesis presents the most significant social commentary posed by the novelists. In this stage three turn to external regulatory structures, such as marriage in particular or the law in general, some of the novelists—such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, and Frances Burney—applaud the philosopher’s proposal for regulating social harmony. However, other novelists—such as Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley—use their fictional works to dramatize how this turn to external regulatory structures led to gender and class discrimination, to the point of women experiencing social condemnation, unjust imprisonment, and capital punishment. (shrink)

In this project I investigate and develop a theory of desire primarily focused on the metaphysics of desire. Since my theory of desire is an evaluative theory, I address discussions concerning value and goodness, and its relation to the ethics and metaphysics of desire. Defining a desire is a complex endeavor and so is determining how desires fit within our mental economy. To locate my position, I begin with an investigation of various, often opposing, theories of desire. I examine motivational (...) theories, pleasure-based theories, reward/learning accounts, and evaluative models. Ultimately, I argue that none of these theories provides adequate explanation for the metaphysics or phenomenology of desire. After providing arguments against these approaches, I develop my position called the “agent relative” model. I argue that desire is affective and that all affect requires an attachment to the object. Attachments are essentially self-regarding; therefore, desire is essentially self-regarding. I argue that for S to desire P, is for S to see P as good-for S. It may be that for S to desire P, is for S to experience P as good rather than experiencing P as good for S’s own wellbeing. Nevertheless, I argue for the latter and hold that the former can be true of hope, but that hope and desire are different. Finally, I argue that given my evaluative theory of desire, a modified desire satisfaction account of well-being can connect the truths found in standard desire satisfaction models with an objective list model of well-being. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I develop a convict epistemology that interweaves two elements: 1) a deep engagement with the works of particular philosophers and scholars investigating questions of punishment, violence, biopolitics and political philosophy 2) with some specific, publicly-reported incidents within California prisons in the late 20th and 21st centuries and my own detailed narration of events and the structural and quotidian dynamics of the prison yard as I experienced them as inmate #K73299 from 1997 to 2005. Diverging from Foucauldian theories (...) of disciplinarity, I argue that under neoliberalism, the primary punishments that any inmate is subjected to within the carceral thresher are in excess of what they were sentenced to endure by the court. Taken together, these extrajuridical punishments constitute a thanatopolitical machinery of forms of state-organized violence that are delegated to inmates and are therefore disavowed and have utterly subsumed the carceral interior. Because this violence is directed at particular, largely racialized populations – the majority of the prison population being Black and Brown - abandonment to the contemporary prison and its thanatopolitical machinery is proto-genocidal. The primary function of the contemporary prison, then, is to actively abandon a largely racialized, rendered superfluous population within a forcefully bounded and statetotalized space to a steered machinery of delegated, proto-genocidal death production. As this thanatopolitical machinery of inmate-on-inmate violence has subsumed the prison yard, I argue that the contemporary prison is the carceral state’s manufacture of an artificial Hobbesian-style state of nature, an always potential war of all-against-all or prison race riot, through the interaction of the four following carceral logics: 1) The imposition of scarcity, 2) atop a forcefully undifferentiated population, 3) that is barred the capacity to flee, or, the state enjoying a monopoly over inmate movement, and 4) within conditions of functional lawlessness. Resultantly, through carceral inscription, each and every inmate is rendered as a “savage,” a less-than-fully-human ontological type, and it is this concept that does sufficient ideological work to anchor normative subjectivity within neoliberalized social space through negation. It is also the prison as artificial state of nature and constitutive boundary that civil society comes to define itself against, both materially and ideologically. Further, as a result of these four foundational carceral logics, inmates are forced to enact or endure daily forms of lesser violence, often as conscious means of forestalling more lethal and larger-scale entropic violence. As disease infects the individual body and undermines it, this violent “savagery” at the gates (prison race riot and lesser forms of violence meant to prevent it) is perceived within the whitesupremacist Hobbesian fantasy anchoring normative subjectivity as threatening the “body politic” with annihilation. Through Roberto Esposito’s immunitarian paradigm, the contemporary prison should be read as a series of recursive quarantines called forth to inoculate civil society from the perceived contagious threat of “violence disease” materialized as largely racialized, inmate bodies. The concept of the less-than-fully-human inmate is thus semantically overloaded with notions of both savagery and contamination then, and daily life within prison for inmates is largely organized by “prison-politics” as prophylactic, epidemiological strategy that guarantees social distance between racialized groupings that stalls out a race riot’s transmissibility as the prison’s very condition of being, And as inmates are articulated as a less-than-fully-human savage/contaminant threats, they are through René Girard’s framework of sacrificial violence to be read as being marginalized from civil society; a sacrificial category of less-than-full-humanness functioning as lightning rod or attractor for all the varied hostilities and insecurities roiling a violently restructured, neoliberalized social space. It is the contemporary prison that allows white supremacist community to cohere through time through the regular displacement of internal antagonisms generated under neoliberalism towards the inmate as sacrificial subject. The prison is a sacrificial stone. (shrink)

Almost exactly fifty years ago, Friedrich Kambartel, in his classic essay “Ethics and Mathematics,” did pioneering work in an intellectual environment that almost self-evidently assumed a strict separation of the two fields. In our first section we summarize and discuss that classical paper. The following two sections are devoted to complement and contrast Kambartel’s picture. In particular, the second section is devoted to ethical aspects of the indirect and direct mathematization of modern societies. The final section gives a short categorization (...) of various philosophical positions with respect to the rationality of ethics and the mutual relation between ethics and mathematics. (shrink)

Both Spinoza and Buddhism raise objection to the existence of the self as independent. This work presents Spinoza’s and early Buddhism’s account of the non-self respectively, namely, that the self does not have independent existence. Starting from the non-self, I look into the metaphysical pictures outlined by Spinoza and Buddhism and argue that despite their agreement on the non-self, they differ in regard to their metaphysical views in general. In comparing and contrasting the two, I shall conclude that both fall (...) short in some regards, and the two should be combined and complement each other. This will lead us to a denial of any independent existent thing. Thus, a comparative study of Spinoza and early Buddhism will end up with a view held by later Buddhism, emptiness, such that all things lack independent existence. (shrink)

This paper is a critique on ideology critique. In this paper, I argue that, even though ideology critique is often conceived as the means to unmask oppressive relations, it can also mask and further perpetuate those relations. First, I introduce the concept of discourse by discussing its implications for social activities. Then, I draw a parallel between discourse and games to offer a way of accounting for the mechanism of discourse–how it is structured and how it may be changed. With (...) this understanding of discourse, I analyze some case studies of ideology critique, which I identify as a type of discourse. In those case studies, I demonstrate how an ideology critique can assume problematic rules, so that it no longer plays a liberation game but an oppression game. I propose some ways to avoid constructing an oppressive ideology critique and anticipate some possible objections. In the end, I show how this lesson learned from ideology critique can be applied to self-examination and raise some interesting questions for further exploration. (shrink)

Fidelity to the Cartesian philosophy requires a defense of dualism as well as mind-body union and interaction, all the while keeping to some form of the causal likeness principle. Each of these positions are ones that Descartes maintained throughout his writings. Yet, successors and scholars alike have noted the inconsistencies that arise from defending these views conjointly and have argued that one or more of them should be abandoned. Even the first generation of Cartesian successors whose fidelity to the Cartesian (...) principles was especially steadfast, such as Louis de la Forge, have been interpreted and characterized as giving up causal interactionism and wittingly or unwittingly embracing occasionalism. In my dissertation project, I have made mind-body not body-body cases the starting point of the inquiry into cartesian causal interactionism and from there developed a general model of interaction. This goes against the scholarly norm of focusing on the body-body cases to develop a model that then cannot explain how the mind-body cases work. This is not a minor change in point of view, but rather, requires a paradigm shift in cartesian studies, particularly with respect to understanding mind-body union and interaction. Further supporting the needed paradigm shift in our reading of La Forge is that in his account of union criteria we discover that mind-body union is the true union and that body-body unions are considered such only by extension. As such the case of mind-body union should be taken as the exemplar case and not body-body. According to La Forge, mind and body are linked via the relative attribute of will and share a relationship of mutual and reciprocal dependence. Union is not based on a spatial relation. The union is a hybrid mode – a way of being of the two substances if and when they stand in such a relation to one another. While, the union provides the commonality needed to bridge the gap of what two distinct substances have in common it does not provide the explanation of how mind and body interact. Operationalizing the union in terms of mutual and reciprocal dependence requires further explanation. La Forge explains that mind and body are secondary causes. The causal model of interaction of mind and body is one in which these particular causes and their relation of mutual and reciprocal dependence allows for the action of the one to bring about the effect in the other. The body’s movements stimulate thoughts in the mind and the mind’s thoughts direct movements in the body. There is a bi-directional causal interaction. Furthermore, by coupling La Forge’s account of union and interaction with that of Nadler’s proposed occasional causation model we find that mind and body both have causal agency in the weaker secondary sense. Both substances have the power to determine and direct motion, albeit neither mind nor body create motion per se. La Forge establishes a key distinction between universal and particular causes, which then grounds his subsequent attribution of secondary causal power to wills – to direct the movements of bodies, and to bodies in virtue of their modes of configuration – to direct the movement of other bodies. While, God is the universal and efficient cause that creates minds, bodies, and motion, He has minimal involvement in the particular determinations of volitions and movements. He imparts power to His creatures to determine motion. God conserves the world and the laws set by Him in the form of three laws of motion and seven laws of union. However, finite substances such as mind and body also have force, albeit not in the same sense as God does as the universal and total cause, but rather as particular secondary causes that have autonomy and can determine the direction and local quantity of motion. Thus, La Forge explains how both mind-body and body-body interactions are genuine causes, i.e., non-occasionalistic. Accordingly, in keeping with Cartesian philosophy La Forge maintains dualism, and provides an account of union and an account of interaction that is not occasionalistic. Both mind-body and body-body interaction is based on equivocal causation – the effect does not strictly resemble the cause – but both operate through the likenesses of relations of union, mutual dependence and proximity respectively. Thus, La Forge’s causal model that has minds and bodies interacting based on their relation of mutual and reciprocal dependence, and bodies interacting based on their shared mutual proximity and dependence, provides a weaker account of the causal likeness principle. Nonetheless, there is nothing inconsistent with his defense of a weaker notion of likeness that does not demand resemblance. My examination of La Forge’s Treatise on the Human Mind has demonstrated that we can maintain fidelity in our interpretation of Descartes and the Cartesian philosophy that maintains its adherence to dualism while giving an account of union and causal interaction. (shrink)

Ethics isn’t a conversation exclusive to philosophers. There is value, then, in not only understanding how laypeople think about issues in ethics, but also bringing their judgments into dialogue with those of philosophers in order to make sense of agreement, disagreement, and the consequences of each. Experimental philosophers facilitate this dialogue uniquely by capturing laypeople’s judgments and analyzing them in light of philosophical theory. They have done so almost exclusively by using face valid quantitative surveys about philosophically interesting thought experiments. (...) Based on high participant support for this or that response, researchers conclude that a given theory is more or less intuitive, and in some cases that it is or isn’t true. However, such conclusions can only be drawn from quantitative survey data if one assumes those data accurately reflect laypeople’s thinking on the issues of interest, an assumption that can’t be justified by the quantitative data itself since they are potentially opaque. This is the methodological problem of experimental philosophy: experimental philosophers who use quantitative methods alone can’t sufficiently demonstrate their data to be reflective of relevant judgments/intuitions. To better explore people’s judgments on issues in ethics and to determine whether experimental philosophers are or aren’t getting what they take themselves to be getting in surveys, I recreated part of an experiment by Chituc, Henne, Sinnott-Armstrong, and De Brigard on the Kantian principle that “ought implies can”, or that whenever an agent ought to do something then it is the case that she can, and added a layer of qualitative data to it by having participants think aloud while completing the surveys and conduct a follow-up interview. With similar quantitative results to those from Chituc et al., I argue that my qualitative results 1) cast doubt on Chituc et al.’s data being reflective of many people’s judgments, especially on the more interesting questions relating to moral obligation; 2) reveal unique insights into how people think about OIC; 3) generally speak to the value of experimental philosophers using triangulation of methods in better understanding laypeople’s complex and varied thinking about questions important to ethics and beyond. Supplemental documents: Appendices A, B, C, D, and E are surveys I used in my study. Appendices C and D are derived from Chituc et al.’s publication “Blame, Not Ability, Impacts Moral ‘Ought’ Judgments for Impossible Actions: Toward an Empirical Refutation of ‘Ought’ Implies ‘Can.’” Appendix F is the recruitment flyer I distributed for my study. Appendix H is the quantitative data from my study. (shrink)

This dissertation begins by asking, what is the body, and how does one develop an understanding of the body? In this study, I aim to rework the notions of discursive practices and material phenomena, seeking to examine the relationship between the two in light of the work of art, so conceived within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, in an attempt to deal with the question: “what is the body?” This dissertation avoids reifying certain normative descriptions of the body or constraining (...) the matter of the body as strictly the effect of discursive power. I attempt a phenomenological observation about subjectivity and our capacity for meaning-making, which avoids a reduction to both materialism and discourse. My own approach to the topic seeks to gain an existential-ontological understanding of the body through the lens of disclosive affectivity, specifically when experiencing the work of art. I take as a starting premise that the situated nature of being human is fundamentally corporeal, in a way that is not reducible to either materialism or idealism. This dissertation also aims to see whether it is possible to maintain that bodies change the quality of the space they inhabit and, in turn, to see how space affects the corporeal nature of an entity. In the course of this study, the matter of the body will unfold as more than an instantiation of materiality and more than an effect of language, for it exists and emerges, in its totality, as a kind of liminal space, one that is irreducible to certain categories of thought and analysis, as the experiences of what we will come to call the “lived-body,” which is the situation of the person asking the question of the body, is the very basis and possibility of questioning. This dissertation will demonstrate how it is that Martin Heidegger’s post-metaphysical conceptions of truth, especially those emerging out of a focus on the work of art, provide a means to conceive of the body beyond the matter/language binary prominent in much post-structuralist literature on materiality. In going a step further than being, by taking “being human” as the central concept in Heidegger, I aim to more fully understand corporeality through the lens of later Heidegger’s writings on the fourfold, art and space, and dwelling. There are numerous approaches to aesthetics and philosophy of art from which one can appropriate when inquiring into the nature of the body; an entity, I argue, that is constituted at the point of overlap between materiality and discourse. With a broad understanding of what encompasses objects of art, I see art as a means and a conduit for the perpetual reconstitution of the becoming self, as well as a way to make sense of the self. The work of art is powerful because it “un-conceals” and reveals truths in non-conceptual, non-verbal ways: art shows, it does not tell. When we think about what it means to be human, to be situated as a material person also capable of thoughts and emotions, this dissertation seeks to know how we develop, shed, change, alter, and deepen a sense of self and what is true. Art fulfills this role in its ideological function and its affective effect. The other contention is that this affectivity is possible only based on a very particular way of expressing what it means to be a material being, and I think this requires a shift from embodiment and body to flesh. Flesh is that part of ourselves that situates us as an individual and as an entity enmeshed in the world, porous to experience and affected by what we encounter. This dissertation draws a connection between flesh and the lived-body. We will see that art is born of the flesh, and the body is, in turn, affected by aesthetic experiences. Thus, art is a way to understand the mutually dependent ideas of world, flesh, and lived-body. The significance of this study, an inquiry into the nature of the body from an existential-ontological approach, is that it reaches for a type of relationality and ontological structure that bears on the social order, to set a foundation for how to approach issues of ethics and justice. (shrink)

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates presents an image of human beings in a cave to portray the political situation. I contend a close reading of Aristotle’s extant Corpus Aristotelicum reveals a possible path to liberation from his version of the cave. For Aristotle, human beings are slaves if they are unable to follow the rule of the soul. Within the soul, the intellect is the ruling part. Following Simpson, I think it is plausible that all four surviving ethical works were written (...) by Aristotle with the possibility that each had a particular audience. An exegesis of these works as well as his treatise on politics brings to light the liberal education that he intends for some of his students. This education appears to begin with habituation toward the virtues culminating in the attainment of the virtue of prudence such that the student will be liberated both from excessive pursuit of external goods and the passions of the body. Once free, this student will be able to solely pursue the intellectual virtue of wisdom and find happiness in the contemplative life. For Aristotle, the peak of human life is found in the attainment of nobility-and-goodness as described in the Eudemian Ethics. The noble-and-good human being has all the necessary and measured amounts of both the external goods and the goods of the body. This human being also has complete virtue and pursues the goods of the soul to excess culminating in a life devoted to contemplating the god, which I take to be a reference to the motionless first mover. The Great Ethics appears to be addressed to a politically ambitious student and it seems that Aristotle specifically attempts to persuade this student toward a serious pursuit of virtue, justice, and prudence with a view to both citizenship and friendship. The audience of this treatise is repeatedly told that it is just and prudent to give up wealth and rule to those of greater virtue. Otherwise, such goods would be harmful to those without the proper virtues. Although serious is a neutral term itself, when it is combined with the verb to rule, the term can take on a negative connotation. This combined word means to scheme, to intrigue, or to be eager for office, and is found in the Politics. For Aristotle, democracies undergo revolution and turmoil when those eager for office act as demagogues. Regarding the other works, I assert the Eudemian Ethics is likely addressed to someone who has experience with or at least knows of the theoretical or natural sciences. The Nicomachean Ethics appears to be addressed to those especially from the standpoint of the judge, ruler, and lawgiver. On Virtues and Vices seems to be directed to a younger audience and almost anyone in the polis or political community concerned with virtue and vice. Overall, education in youth is directed toward the free, the noble, and the true. Aristotle gives the impression that this education is an early preparation for the contemplative life. Later education has an openness to this life and generally comes into being through a combination of following the law, habituation, and being persuaded by speech or teaching. Overall, Aristotle seems to direct certain students or audiences to specific ends. Some could be led to pursue wisdom, some might pursue prudence in light of possibly serving as judges, rulers, or lawgivers, while others may pursue prudence with a view to both citizenship and friendship. Lastly, Aristotelian freedom differs from liberty in liberal democracy in a few important ways. First, liberal democracy overemphasizes external freedom within the regime. Second, in liberal democracy there is an excessive pursuit of property and a later push towards absolute equality that is unjust by Aristotle’s standards. Third, in liberal democracy and early modern political philosophy, education is an entirely separate topic and there is no longer a direct connection between education and the regime as found in Aristotelian political philosophy. (shrink)

This dissertation explores Levinas’s phenomenology of death in order to unveil the religious dimension in his ethical thought through examining the political moment of the third party. I argue that death is neither a pure phenomenon transparently intelligible in the noema-noesis structure of intentionality nor a mere non-phenomenon totally irrelevant to the phenomenological investigation. Rather, death is a para-phenomenon whose unfathomable feature calls into question Levinas’s two important philosophical precedents: 1) Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, in a methodological sense, and 2) Heidegger’s (...) ontological interpretation of death, in a thematical sense. On the one hand, Levinas faces in the para-phenomenality of death the failure of phenomenology in the sense that phenomenology fails to capture a para-doxical feature of death in terms of a noetico-noematic correlation. On the other hand, Levinas ceaselessly contests Heidegger’s ontological thematization, which neutralizes the para-phenomenality of death and thereby reduces the enigmatic mystery of death into the heroic mastery of death; in sum, the para-phenomenality of death is subsumed under the doxical architecture of ontology. By appealing to the para-doxical character of death, this dissertation claims that the architectonic structure of Heidegger’s ontology dissimulates or covers up a more primordial and exigent signification of the death of the other than the ontological mineness [Jemeinigkeit] of death. Therefore, Levinas’s phenomenology of death justifies its raison d'être not in its adroit achievement to thematize death but rather in its failure to thematize and make sense of it since the ethical meaning of death emerges from the miscarriage of the doxical-ontological thematization of death. In order to disclose the ethical signification of death that remains concealed, obscured, and suppressed in the “Sein-topped" architecture of ontology, Levinas endeavors to uncover what ontology has covered up—i.e., the brutal nakedness of being [être] that is concretized in the ethical encounter with the other who commands: “Thou shalt not kill.” This primordial interdiction obsesses and overwhelms me [moi] more than the anxiety [Angst] for my death does, as if the death of the other would matter to me even more than my own. The ethical signification of death comes from the primordial call inscribed in the face of the other, which makes me vigilant, restless, and non-indifferent to the death of the other. However, the advent of the third party puts into question my exclusive, unconditional, or unquestioned responsibility for the other and orders what the other orders: “Me voici.” Nevertheless, the political interrogation of the third party never compromises the ethical structure but, on the contrary, makes it possible for ethics to remain ethical without relapsing into an impotent, silent, or angelic form of ethics, which entails violent, apolitical, and anti-ethical rapprochements. This dissertation insists that the radical peculiarity of Levinas’s phenomenology of death culminates in his para-doxical conception of religion, “rapport sans rapport,” in which the ethical rapport always remains as a question par excellence within the political context. To be religious does not require an ontological question of “to be or not to be,” of being or non-being; rather, it is otherwise than being, beyond essence, or beyond the conatus essendi, in which Levinas recognizes the primordial signification of death, such as substitution, sacrifice, or dying for others. (shrink)

This dissertation is a collection of four studies which collectively explore a hypothesized construct of ‘moral evaluation of patient behaviors’ (MEPB) as a driver of health professionals’ readiness to interact humanistically with their patients. In these studies, ‘humanistic interactions’ refer to the non-technical, intangible skills and factors of clinical competence; the factors specifically explored in these studies were compassion toward patients, self-efficacy for treating patients, and optimism toward patient treatment. For the purpose of specificity, all factors were examined as they (...) pertained to patients with substance use disorders. Survey data from a convenience sample of 524 health professionals (i.e. physicians, nurses, and other health professionals) from three culturally distinct areas of the world (i.e. California (n = 173), urban France (n = 102), and urban China (n = 249)) were analyzed using analyses of variance, Welch’s t-tests, confirmatory factor analyses, and structural equation models. Results indicate: 1.) Psychometric support for the survey tool that was created for the assessment of the hypothesized construct of MEPB among health professionals, and information on differences on this hypothesized construct by age group, occupation, and country of residence; 2.) Indication that this survey tool operates differently among health professionals in different countries, which supports the notion that people from differing cultures have differing notions about morality. 3.) In the California sample, results indicate that while moral judgements of patients’ behavior carries mixed associations with factors of health professionals’ readiness to interact humanistically with these patients, moral judgements of the self (or, moral self-image) have only positive associations with factors of this readiness for humanistic interaction. This finding supports the notion that having a healthy self-concept strengthens one’s ability to support others. 4.) In all three countries, moral evaluations were positively associated with optimism toward treating patients, and in urban China, they were additionally positively associated with compassion and with self-efficacy. Given weak measurement invariance (i.e. differences in the operation of the measurement of moral evaluations by country), more research is needed in this area. The current research provides a tool for examining research of just this nature, and most importantly suggests that morality does not need to be eliminated from perspectives of mental illness or addiction, but rather that more nuanced moral perspectives are needed. Future research may explore distinctions between moral appraisals and stigma, and associations between moral evaluations (both among health professionals and among patients) and clinical/health outcomes such as rates of relapse and recovery. (shrink)

This review of Reckonings shares our thoughts on the diverse insights presented by Stephen Chrisomalis’s version of the history of numerical notation. Chrisomalis suggests that members of distinct cultural groups write numbers as an active choice in accordance with their own sociocultural contexts, which reflect the influences of historical, cognitive, social, economic, political, environmental, and cultural factors. This book integrates comparative, cognitive, and evolutionary understandings on numerical cognition with historical and linguistic evidence on the use and transformation of numeral systems (...) through the historical advancement of numeracy. Chrisomalis offers an interesting historical perspective on numbers that builds upon three main themes: numerals, cognition, and history. Reckonings can inspire us to view the concept and constructs of numeracy through a historical and sociocultural lens. (shrink)