Physicalism, Substance, and the Shifting Locus of Fundamentality
Year of Dissertation:
2012
I demonstrate two main theses. First, the physicalist and Aristotelian worldviews are deeply incompatible, particularly in regards to the locus of fundamentality: where the fundamental level of reality is taken to be, which entities, processes, and facts are understood as fundamental, and, as a corollary, which are taken to be derivative or unreal. Second, the physicalist is committed to eliminativism about what the Aristotelian thinks is the fundamental basis of reality. And as these Aristotelian theses largely comport with a common-sense ontology, I thereby show that physicalism is far more revisionary than many have suspected.
PROBABILITY, SIMPLICITY, AND INFINITY: A CRITIQUE OF RICHARD SWINBURNE'S ARGUMENT FOR THEISM
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Richard Swinburne has presented an extended argument, spanning many works, the conclusion of which is that God likely exists. His argument is a cumulative argument, which means that he considers many pieces of evidence in arguing that God likely exists. The evidence he considers is evidence that is traditionally considered separately (or not at all) in arguments to God's existence.
The Structure of Practical Rationality
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Many pressing metaethical problems can be conceived as a need for placing a kind of meaningful and objective morality into an integrated and explanatory worldview, and this requires a constructive explanation of moral obligation. There are two major problems for giving such an explanation. On the one hand, moral obligations must be grounded in a general scheme of practical normativity; otherwise, they can have no authority. On the other hand, moral obligations must arise from social relations; otherwise, they lose their character as demands that a moral community has the authority to enforce.
Philia and Method: A Translation and Commentary on Plato's "Lysis"
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This work presents a translation of Plato's dialogue on friendship and a commentary that explores the cultural, literary and philosophical aspects of the dialogue. The translation aims to provide readers with an English version of the dialogue that eschews word-for-word literalness but retains some formality and avoids modern idioms.
Marx's Democratic Idea: Communism's Relation to Liberal Theory
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Advisor:
Sibyl Schwarzenbach
My dissertation, "Marx's Democratic Idea: Communism's Relation to Liberal Theory," focuses on working out the undeveloped connections between Marx's economic theory and his political critique. I develop a conception of Marx's work which demonstrates that his critique of the republican political state and capitalist private property relations led to a demand to develop communal, discursively empowered agency over economic relations. I argue that the communist project thus should be viewed as inseparable from a concern about both just social relations (non-coercive, non-exploitative relations) and the maintaining and empowering of democratic, political procedures. I then critically appropriate the work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas to fill out a normative standpoint which makes clear structural demands that must be fulfilled to realize a commitment to equality, but also notes that a part of justice is fulfilling the preconditions of discursive relations which should serve to consciously reproduce social relations (and allow citizen self-monitoring of the provision and maintenance of just relations). I then connect the conception of "citizen," which entails state granted protections, rights, and privileges, to Marx's early, descriptive standpoint of democracy, which simply refers to or emphasizes the location or place of each member of society in social reproduction. A connection is found then between a "non-ideal" social theory, which asks one to note the practices and relations which are found in and maintain a society, and an ideal theory of democracy which asks social relations to be consciously or discursively guided. Justice demands are then seen as inseparable from a communist perspective which critiques the alienated and exploitative relations of wage labor to capital; not as transcended in communist relations, but instead, as inherent to their construal and maintenance.
The Stratification of Nature
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Herein, I suggest that contemporary nonreductive materialsm, the view originated by Fodor (1974) and Putnam (1975), and traditional British emergentism, the view advocated by Alexander, Morgan, and Broad, share a commitment to the existence of higher level properties. I identify all of the arguments and evidence cited in favor of belief in higher-level properties, including evidence culled from composition, multiple realization, projectable predicates, and higher-level ceteris paribus laws. Finally, I argue that all of the evidence cited in favor of the existence of higher-level properties can be explained without positing higher-level properties as long as we accept some plausible assumptions about predicates and properties, most importantly that singular predicates can pick out clusters of properties and that singular predicates can pick out different properties in different objects.
Time, Unity, and Conscious Experience
Year of Dissertation:
2013
In my dissertation I critically survey existing theories of time consciousness, and draw on recent work in neuroscience and philosophy to develop an original theory. My view depends on a novel account of temporal perception based on the notion of temporal qualities, which are mental properties that are instantiated whenever we detect change in the environment. When we become aware of these temporal qualities in an appropriate way, our conscious experience will feature the distinct temporal phenomenology that is associated with the passing of time. The temporal qualities model of perception makes two predictions about the mechanisms of time perception; one that time perception is modality specific and the other that it can occur without awareness. My argument for this view partially depends on a number of psychophysical experiments that I designed and implemented myself and which investigate subjective time distortions caused by looming visual stimuli. These results show that the mechanisms of conscious experience of time are distinct from the mechanisms of time perception, as my theory of temporal qualities predicts.
Tableaux and hypersequents for modal and justification logics
Year of Dissertation:
2012
In this thesis, we discuss both philosophical and technical issues on proof theory of modal logic and justification logic.
Endurance and Multilocation
Author:
Jean-David Lafrance
Year of Dissertation:
2011
Material objects exist at different times. Endurance theory is the view that they are wholly present at each of the times at which they exist--or, that they are located at multiple regions of spacetime. In this dissertation, I argue that endurance theory is coherent by explaining how cases of multilocation (whether in space or in spacetime) are possible. My goals are twofold. The first is to show that there is nothing incoherent, both metaphysically and formally, in cases of multilocation and, thereby, in endurance theory. After having introduced temporal and regional variants of classical extensional mereology together with some principles about the location of objects in space, I show how our reluctance to admit cases of multilocation can be resisted by responding to an argument to the effect that they are incoherent. I then defend the view that endurance is multilocation in spacetime against rival characterizations. And, in the Appendix to the Dissertation, I develop formal theories of location in which objects can be located at several regions of space (or space-time).
The Representational Character of Imagination
Author:
Peter Langland-Hassan
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Two dogmas shape most theorizing on sensory imagination (thought involving imagery) and propositional imagination (imagining that thus and such). The first is that imaginers have privileged access to what they are imagining; the second is that imagining involves cognitive mechanisms over and above those underlying belief. I challenge both assumptions, arguing that one can easily be wrong about what one is sensorily imagining, and that propositional imagining requires only ordinary beliefs and desires. The former claim is supported through a distinction between the representational (or `intentional') content of an imaginative experience and the matter of whether the "success" conditions given by that content are satisfied. The latter is advanced on grounds of parsimony, as more baroque hypotheses are shown not to be borne out by the data. In addition, a novel theory of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the sense of agency had over one's own imaginings is developed, through an analysis of cases (in schizophrenia) when the phenomenology of thought-agency is abnormal.