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Browsing by Subject "Philosophy"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 28
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    Agents and Achievement: An investigation of Gwen Bradford's view
    (2017-10) Brighouse Glueck, Madeline
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    The application of evidence-based medicine to the field of surgery.
    (2012-01) Kalliainen, Loree K.
    Nonsurgical physicians have increasingly advocated for and adopted the use of data derived from well-done scientific studies (evidence-based medicine) to assist in decision making in patient care. Surgeons have, in general, resisted incorporating evidence-based medicine into their practices, and most surgical research has been based on expert opinions or findings from small groups of patients. This work will cover arguments for and against a hierarchy of evidence and for and against application of higher levels of evidence in the field of surgery.
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    The business of beneficence: the commodification of the patient-health care provider relationship.
    (2009-07) Johnson, Britt E.
    I claim that the shift from viewing the patient-health care provider relationship from (A) one of a professional advocating for the welfare of his/her patient to (B) a business transaction is immoral because the primary motivations of the health care provider and the business person are fundamentally different. In support of this position, I offer two arguments. First, I argue that the patient-health care provider relationship is not a business relationship. Second, I argue that the patient-health care provider relationship cannot be altered in order to make this relationship into a business relationship without forcing the health care provider to act immorally. In order to make these arguments, I illustrate two major points. First, viewing the patient-provider relationship as a business transaction results from a misunderstanding, either of the nature of a business interaction or of the fundamental principles of medical care. This mistaken understanding of the incapability of the two types of interactions leads to the false conclusion that the patient-provider relationship can be viewed as a business relationship. Second, it is immoral to attempt to alter the patient-provider relationship in order to make said relationship a business relationship because doing so necessarily eliminates the essential virtue involved in patient care, namely beneficence.
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    Care of the Machine Self: physiology, cybernetics, humanistic systems in ergonomics
    (2013-01) Martinez, Mark A.
    This dissertation discusses the ways that scientific thought and philosophy have theorized human life and machines in western thought.
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    Contingency, predication, and counterfactuals in the history and philosophy of science.
    (2011-12) Martin, Joseph Daniel
    Abstract summary not available
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    Eric McLuhan’s 2015 Book and Walter J. Ong’s Thought
    (2016-09-05) Farrell, Thomas J.
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    An Exercise in Building a Meaningful Life: Game Design for Young Philosophers
    (2017) Beard, David; LaChance Adams, Sarah
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    Finitude after after finitude
    (2014-06) Frank, Jay Alexander
    This work represents my efforts to rethink the relationship between philosophical materialism and contemporary rhetorical studies along the lines of Quentin Meillassoux's speculative materialism. Cast as an allegory to Michael Calvin McGee's essay "A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric," the first portion of this work examines the historical evolution of theories of materialist rhetoric as a response to an antecedent turn towards hermeneutics in rhetorical criticism. I claim that, although they represent complex institutional responses to the "hermeneutic" tradition in rhetoric, what have been called "materialist" theories of rhetoric do not fundamentally escape that tradition, and therefore have little to do with materialism. In part two, I examine Slavoj Zizek's speech at Zucotti Park on October 9, 2011. In doing so I uncover some analytical difficulties the "human microphone" poses for both "hermeneutic" and "materialist" rhetoric, and offer alternative connections to philosophy as new ways for rhetoricians to discuss proletarian organization.
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    Human defect
    (2014-11) Herr, Mark Zimmerman
    I argue that under an Aristotelian understanding of human nature it is impossible for human beings to ever be fully good. Some recent accounts of moral virtue, especially that of Philippa Foot, that start from a notion of a fully good life for human beings, and take human goodness to be what is required to live that life. But there is a problem with this, namely that the idea of an ideally good human life requires an understanding of human nature first, and that account of human nature is exactly what is expressed by a picture of what it is to be a good human being. Instead we should start from an idea of what it is to be a human being, expressed in functional terms. I argue that it is possible to do this by taking functions to be part of the membership criteria for certain kinds of things. Then I argue that we can identify which ways of evaluating human beings functionally are moral evaluations by reference to the characteristic use of those evaluations. Finally I argue that if virtue both involves a link to human nature and gets things right, as Aristotelian accounts do, many human virtues are unattainable, since humans characteristically get things wrong.
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    Humanizing the Cold War campus: the battle for hearts and minds at MIT, 1945-1965.
    (2009-11) Kizilos-Clift, Peter Justin
    Abstract not available.
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    Ideals and Institutions Their Parallel Development
    (1894) Merrill, John Ernest
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    Individualism and the aesthetic
    (2012-04) Shin, Hyun Joo
    The goal of this dissertation is to have a better understanding of three aesthetic theories that I take to be central in western aesthetics since the modern period, i.e., aesthetic formalism, the theory of aesthetic supervenience, and modern aesthetics, by examining them with a perspective that I derive from the debate between externalism and individualism in the philosophy of mind. I argue that the three aesthetic theories under examination can be seen, firstly, as centrally concerned with psychological issues, and secondly, as based on the individualistic picture of the mind. And since individualism as a picture of the mind has already been shown to be the basis of the major theories of mind, knowledge, and meaning, starting from Cartesianism to theories of quite recent years, we can say that these aesthetic theories were also shaped by the philosophical current in which psychological individualism was deeply ingrained and powerfully operative. This also reveals that these aesthetic theories are in conflict with psychological externalism, which has been widely acknowledged to do justice to ways in which we characterize the content of a mental state. This conflict leads me to question why psychological individualism has been consistently used in these aesthetic theories without being noticed or critically discussed. To be precise, there is an individualistic assumption which is shared by aesthetic formalism and the theory of aesthetic supervenience and is developed from modern aesthetics, and the fact that this assumption has not been noticed by others suggests to me that there is something intuitive in the assumption. With this point in mind, I explore what intuition is behind the assumption and show that the intuition playing a crucial role in the Cartesian skeptical thought experiment and also in the standard theories of perception is essential to these aesthetic theories.
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    International law and global justice: why institutional features of international law matter to discussions of global justice.
    (2011-08) Davidovic, Jovana
    Do the structure and processes of the institution of international law limit the actions that can be justly performed in the international arena and how? This question can be separated into two steps: First, is there a reason to think that some proposed individual principle of global justice is necessarily incompatible with international law? Second, does that give us a reason to think that that proposed principle is wrong, i.e. that we ought not to act in accord with it? I argue that some of the time the answers to both of these questions are `yes'. If we can without too much controversy develop a set of conditions necessary for international law and develop an analysis of international law based on those necessary conditions, we can answer the first question. If we can give a principled account of which types of solutions to global justice dilemmas require compatibility with international law, we can answer the second of the two questions. Together these two answers can help us in narrowing not simply and not primarily the field of policy options, but in fact the field of philosophical and theoretical options. My primary aim, then, is to suggest an appropriate place for the institution of international law in discussions of global justice. I argue that the necessary features of the institution of international law can and should be used to reject some and accept other principles of global justice. The necessary features of international law I start from are the rule-of-law conditions. My second aim is to show how this argument would work with respect to some particular problems of global justice, like those raised by the principle of the moral equality of combatants in war and secession.
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    M. Cathleen Kaveny’s New Book and Walter J. Ong’s Thought
    (2016-03-17) Farrell, Thomas J.
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    Moral intuitions in reflective equilibrium: applying scientific methodology to ethics.
    (2009-10) Brophy, Matthew E.
    In this dissertation, I examine the credibility of moral intuitions and their relation to moral principles and background theories, as represented in the method of reflective equilibrium (MRE) originally set out by Rawls in A Theory of Justice. As part of elucidation and justification of this method, I make frequent comparisons to scientific methodology, which shares close similarities to the method of reflective equilibrium. I argue that MRE provides a non-foundationalist moral methodology which appears to be a promising approach to moral justification and moral adjudication. Moral intuitions are a crucial feature of MRE: they serve as the starting points of moral theory construction and testing in a similar way as empirical data serve as the starting points of scientific hypothesis construction and testing. Moral intuitions - just as any data - can sometimes be mistaken, however. Upon what basis can the credibility of a moral intuition be determined? I examine how the credibility of an intuition can be determined by examining its "etiology." The etiology of a moral intuition is its causal origin, which includes sociological, psychological, evolutionary and biological factors, some of which might impugn its credibility. Since intuition credibility determination is essential to the methodology of reflective equilibrium, I endeavor to show that moral intuitions can be vetted in nontrivial and noncircular ways. This filtration process discredits those initial moral judgments that are determined to be error-disposed. These resulting noncredible intuitions are then excluded from the set of considered judgments, which serve as the provisional starting points for ethical theory construction and testing. Ultimately, I will show that the moral methodology of reflective equilibrium, when theoretically developed and empirically substantiated, provides a significant contribution to moral philosophy. In particular, this fortified methodology provides further traction in ethical debate and adjudication. I exemplify this point in the final chapter, demonstrating how intuition credibility determination lends defense to a certain form of utilitarianism against certain traditional intuition-based attacks, and I show how the triple adjustment between intuitions, moral principles and background theories, understood in the context of wide reflective equilibrium, can assuage such objections.
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    On the peripheries of western science:Indian science from 1910 to 1930, a cognitive-philosophical analysis.
    (2010-12) Dasgupta, Deepanwita
    That newcomers often take up science remains a prominent feature of scientific practice. Thus, around the established centers of scientific knowledge there grows up a periphery, consisting of various types of newcomers: self-trained autodidacts, people from different disciplines as well as researchers from other cultures and other communities. As new communities join the previously-existing core group, the size of the network increases, setting up complex relationships of collaboration and competition among members of the community. Behind most of the scientific communities that today exist in the non-West, there lies this kind of a complicated history of origin. And yet, within the existing philosophical models of scientific practice that we have with us today, there seems to be no account that can tell us how such newcomers—who become scientists mainly through their own individual efforts—function in science. This seemed remarkable to me when I first started reading the literature of philosophy of science during my initial years in the graduate school. Scientists from the non-West constitute one such prominent group of newcomers who often work from the peripheries of scientific knowledge. In his well-known model of the expansion of Western science into the locations of the non-West, George Basalla (1967) considered peripheral science, i.e., science practiced outside of Europe and North America, to be an instance of diffusion: thus stating, in effect, that those who accept science under such circumstances, accept it as a recipient. As is well-known, this model has been extensively criticized and it has also been suggested that science is perhaps a case of a moving metropolis, that the centers of established knowledge in science shift dynamically over time. However, precisely how the metropolis of science shifts from one place to another and how the newcomers who join the practice of science function within it, remained unclear. Thus, Basalla’s model might have been rejected, but nothing adequate so far has been put into its place. This dissertation is an attempt to think about this long-neglected topic. It seeks to understand peripheral scientific communities and peripheral interactions, and the growth of scientific knowledge within those non-standard contexts. It is about those scientists whose research take place outside of the main community, and yet who often contribute quite significantly to the stock of scientific knowledge. It is written in the belief that there is more to peripheral science than passive acceptance and manifest individual difficulty, that it is intrinsically interesting, and that it tells us a story about science itself, especially about how science is socially organized, and the epistemic consequences of such organization. Hopefully, here is a new topic that can be elucidated by further research—by myself, and by others, who I hope, will join me soon.
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    Philosophical problems in physical science
    (Marxist Educational Press, 1980) Hörz, Herbert; Pöltz, Hans-Dieter; Parthey, Heinrich, 1936-; Röseberg, Ulrich; Wessel, Karl-Friedrich
    This work is the first available in English that examines philosophical problems in classical and modern physics from the dialectical-materialist viewpoint. A team of five outstanding philosophers of natural science in the German Democratic Republic examine such questions as the nature of physical concepts, physical properties and quantities, elementary particles, and the fundamental interactions. This revised English-language edition is suitable for natural scientists having little previous contact with philosophy. --Publisher's summary.
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    Philosophy and the professional Image of philosophy
    (2014-05) Doyle, Thomas
    Philosophy is an academic discipline whose practitioners are subject to forces of professionalization. These forces shape the discipline in ways that often go unnoticed. I present an analysis of the currently dominant image of philosophy that working philosophers have, one that focuses on philosophy's formality, fundamentality, and the widespread use of intuitions, showing that it is partly determined by the history of the professionalization of the discipline. I argue that readings of historical philosophers that are informed by this image tend to obscure the thought of those philosophers. In particular, John Dewey's work in logic is misunderstood when it is evaluated according to the now dominant conception of logic as the study of validity; and the moral writings of John Dewey and Henry David Thoreau are neglected because they do not engage in the contemporary project of grounding normativity. Finally I propose that thinking of philosophy as a practice can help to recover lost historical insights at the same time that it can appropriately focus our attention as philosophers on institutional problems that currently bedevil the discipline.
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    The Place of Citizenship in the Platonic Ideal of Life
    (1922-06) Toomey, Sister Teresa