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Browsing by Department "Philosophy"
Now showing items 1-20 of 62
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A Defense of Basic Prudential Hedonism
(2020)Prudential hedonism is a school of thought in the philosophy of welfare that says that only pleasure is good for us in itself and only pain is bad for us in itself. This dissertation concerns an especially austere form of ... -
A Dialogical Approach to Human Rights: Institutions, Culture and Legitimacy
(2009)In this study I address the moral and cultural disagreement and conflict regarding the interpretation of human rights norms that threatens the legitimacy of the human rights enterprise. Such disagreements present an opportunity ... -
A Naturalistic Philosophy of Play
(2015)This is a philosophical work on the subject of play. Organized around a handful of questions, the thesis approaches inquiry by first integrating empirical lines of research and then applying the methods of philosophy. The ... -
A New Perspective on Sympathy and Its Cultivation, with Insights from the Confucian Tradition
(2017)My dissertation aims to show that sympathy, when well-cultivated, is adequate to motivate and produce altruistic behavior in a consistent and reliable manner. I do so by creating a dialogue between the Chinese and Western ... -
A Philosophical Examination of Working Memory
(2019)Working memory—the mental capacity to “hold on to” information after it ceases to be perceptually available—is one of the most discussed topics in psychology and neuroscience. Despite the importance of working memory in ... -
A Study of Aristotelian Demands for Some Psychological Views of the Emotions
(2009)This dissertation identifies 5 mayor demands regarding the role of the emotions in Aristotelian virtue theories and examines how well some contemporary psychological views of the emotions deal with these issues. The discussion ... -
After Confucius: Psychology and Moral Power
(2008-08-22)According to everyday folk psychology, our deliberate goals and intentions, together with our character traits, explain much of our overt behavior. These ways of explaining behavior are pervasive. According to many ... -
Anger Eliminativism: Stoic and Buddhist Perspectives
(2022)Many psychologists and philosophers hold that anger is a completely normal and often healthy human emotion. This position perhaps traces back to Aristotle, who argued that anger is morally good when it is moderated, such ... -
Animals as Moral Agents
(2022)Since Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation, sentience has been the dominant justification for increasing non-human animal (hereafter ‘animal’) welfare. This dissertation is an attempt to discover a different reason to ... -
Articulating the Core Realist Committment
(2013)This thesis comprises an investigation into a very well known and perennial philosophical debate over the interpretive status of our most well confirmed scientific theories, known as "scientific realism." I do not defend ... -
Authenticity and Enhancement
(2019)Recent accounts of authenticity have defined the concept in terms of self-creation, self-discovery, or some combination of the two. While these accounts get something right about the concept, I argue that they fail to capture ... -
Bad goods: On the political morality of production and consumption in global supply chains
(2019)People buy many goods produced in ways that appear to call for a remedy or a reaction from actors in developed countries: these are goods which appear to have “grave flaws” in the upstream supply chain. For example, one ... -
Chance Begets Order: Hierarchical Probabilistic Processes in the Natural Sciences
(2012)At the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce wrote that "chance begets order" - indeterministic or `chancy' processes can underlie orderly and seemingly deterministic processes. Indeed, Peirce argues that ... -
Culture From Infrahumans to Humans: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology
(2007-05-07)It has become increasingly common to explain the behavior of animals—from sperm whales to songbirds—in terms of culture. But what is animal culture, what is its relationship to other biological concepts and to human culture, ... -
Death is Nothing! A Defense of Epicureanism
(2020)Death can be terrible for the survivors of the deceased, but can it be bad for the deceased themselves? Epicurus argued that it could not be, apparently because there is no temporal overlap between death and the deceased ... -
Debunking Challenges to Moral Realism
(2012)Heightened awareness of the evolutionary, socio-cultural, and psychological origins of our moral judgments pushes many of us in the direction of moral skepticism, in the direction of doubting the objective truth of our moral ... -
Deliberative Bayesianism: Abduction, Reflection, and the Weight of Evidence
(2018)In this dissertation, I defend the thesis that an epistemic judgment of probability must be interpreted against the background of the context of inquiry in which it is made: in the abductive context, judgments of probability ... -
Desire and the Rationality of Virtue
(2009)A classic question in moral philosophy asks "Why be moral?" In other words, what reason or motive do people have to act in accordance with the requirements of morality? In the tradition of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, this ... -
Dispassion and the Good Life: A Study of Stoicism and Zhuangism
(2021)Although the notion of dispassion has played an important role in many different traditions, such as Stoicism, Buddhism, Daoism, and eastern Christianity, it does not seem to hold much appeal to people today. To the modern ... -
Evolutionary Models of Language: A Methodological and Philosophical Study
(2018)My dissertation applies models borrowed from game theory to the evolution of language and the emergence of meaning. To justify the use of such models, I begin in Chapter 1: Quantitative Methods in Philosophy by examining ...
