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The real banality of evil
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2005)
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] When Hannah Arendt encountered Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem she was struck by the fact that his most outstanding characteristic was his ...
Home aestheticus : species being and the struggle for existence
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] In this paper, I argue for the homo aestheticus thesis - the claim that our species nature is that of artistic producer and consumer; that this nature ...
Conscience : toward the mechanism of morality
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2006)
Conscience is frequently cited and yet its mechanism is not understood. Conscience is most familiar as a voice protesting against actions which compromise personal integrity. Persons also cite conscience as that which ...
Natural law and the challenge of legal positivism
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
In this dissertation I develop and defend a version of a general theory of the nature of law inspired by the classical natural law tradition, with special intellectual debt to the articulation of that tradition by John ...
On Foucault and the genealogy of governmentality
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
In this dissertation I perform what I take to be a genealogy of governmentality by tracing the history of governmentality through various political philosophers and culminating in the work of Michel Foucault. I begin with ...
Aristotle on happiness : a comparison with Confucius
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2006)
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines the highest good for humankind in terms of happiness. The nature of happiness includes intellectual activity, virtuous activity, and friendship; and certain external goods are ...
Placement of special obligation in morality
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2005)
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] My thesis attempts to explain how special obligations are moral obligations. The morality of special obligations is put into question by the thesis of ...
Sellars and Socrates : an investigation of the Sellars problem for a Socratic epistemology
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2006)
The Sellars problem threatens the viability of epistemic foundationalism. Foundationalism claims that there are some beliefs whose justification does not depend upon other beliefs. Foundationalism is a popular, non-skeptical ...
A defense of Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2005)
Alvin Plantinga argues that naturalism it is irrational for a reflective person to hold to the doctrine of naturalism. If naturalism is true, some evolutionary doctrine must also be true and our evolutionary history must ...
A justified system of intellectual property rights
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
I argue that weak type-protection is the form our legal intellectual property rights should take. Other intellectual property regimes - specifically, strong type-protection (like that of our current American patent system) ...
Critical pluralism : a new approach to religious diversity
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
The world's religions provide a wide range of competing religious claims. The problem of religious diversity is that, while many of these claims are inconsistent with one another, they often seem to rest on roughly equal ...
Non-cognitivism, internalism, and the Frege-Geach problem
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2007)
This dissertation is about the prospects for non-cognitivism. Chapter One provides some background and introduces the remaining chapters. Chapter Two focuses on the distinction between non-cognitivism about moral thought ...
The phenomenal brain : making room for a phenomenal-neural type identity theory of phenomenal consciousness
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2008)
It is currently popular among physicalist philosophers of mind to suppose that phenomenal consciousness is essentially a representational phenomenon and that a representational theory of phenomenal consciousness will prove ...
Looks are situation-dependent properties
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2017)
This thesis concerns the distinction between appearance and reality. Particularly, the metaphysical nature of a class of visual appearances that I call "looks." I answer the question of what looks are. My positions constitutes ...
An essay on the burden of proof
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2017)
This essay answers two questions: what is a burden of proof, and when is it reasonable to assign a burden of proof? After showing the importance of how we answer these questions, it uses the Western legal tradition as the ...
Defending an indirect normativity of belief
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2019)
In this dissertation, I seek to answer the following questions: is there such a thing as deontic epistemic normativity -- obligations, permissions, and prohibitions to act in a certain way based on epistemic grounds -- and ...
Naturalizing epistemology : reconsidering quine and nietzsche
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2019)
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This dissertation argues for ways to construct a more viable normative epistemology--the part of epistemology that focuses on normative notions such ...
Resisting the nudge
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2018)
"Behavioral scientists have discovered that people predictably behave in ways unlike perfectly rational agents or utility maximizers. For example, it has been found that when people make choices, the degree to which they ...
Three questions concerning Reid's moral epistemology
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2016)
In my dissertation, I argue for a novel interpretation of Reid's moral epistemology. Accordingly, I attempt to show that Reid is committed to the view that we obtain moral knowledge by way of moral intuition and moral ...
Examining the nature of epistemic value
(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2018)