Browsing Philosophy by Title
Now showing items 12-31 of 134
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Commercial and Business Incorporation: Enhancing the notion of corporation to include an ethical statement
(University of Waterloo, 2008-01-22)Today’s modern, Canadian, business corporations are hugely influential in determining public policy and many aspects of people’s lives. Because this influence permeates so much of our social construct, we expect corporations ... -
Common Sense Within the Bounds of Philosophy: Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense Defended
(University of Waterloo, 2009-10-02)I proffer a defense Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense. I address the initial implausibility that greets most all of us when we stop to consider the prospects for common sense as guide to knowledge and inquiry. I argue that ... -
Communal Inferentialism: Charles S. Peirce’s Critique of Epistemic Individualism
(University of Waterloo, 2019-12-09)Charles S. Peirce’s critique of epistemic individualism, the attempt to make the individual the locus of knowledge, is a dominant theme in his writings. While scholars often mention this critique, there is, surprisingly, ... -
A Compatible Defense of Respect for Autonomy and Medical Paternalism in the Context of Mental Capacity on the Grounds of Authenticity
(University of Waterloo, 2009-09-30)Respect for autonomy has become the guiding principle at the forefront of health-care decision-making. In an attempt to preserve this principle, patients can be neglected to make decisions for themselves during times when ... -
Conceptual Change: Gods, Elements, and Water
(University of Waterloo, 2010-09-30)On what does the meaning of the concept of water depend? I consider three possible answers: the physical world, theory, or both the physical world and theory. Each answer supports a particular history. If the history ... -
Conservative Contractarianism
(University of Waterloo, 2004)Moral contractarianism, as demonstrated in the work of David Gauthier, is an attempt to derive moral principles from the non-moral premises of rational choice. However, this contractarian enterprise runs aground because ... -
A Constructive Critical Assessment of Feminist Evolutionary Psychology
(University of Waterloo, 2017-12-21)In this dissertation, I develop an approach to philosophical critique of morally relevant science and apply this approach to a new branch of evolutionary psychology called “feminist evolutionary psychology.” Morally relevant ... -
A Contemporary Examination of the A Fortiori Argument Involving Jewish Traditions
(University of Waterloo, 2010-02-22)This study proposes to clarify the a fortiori argument’s components, structure, definitions, formulations, and logical status, as well as the specific conditions under which it is to be employed, both generally and in a ... -
Contextualizing Science for Value-Conscious Communication
(University of Waterloo, 2019-07-15)Democracy hinges on the personal and civic decision-making capabilities of publics. In our increasingly technoscientific world, being well-informed requires an understanding of science. Despite acknowledging public ... -
The Continuity of Explanation: Peircean Pragmatism, Reason, and Developing Reasonable Behavior
(University of Waterloo, 2017-09-27)Charles Peirce, the founder of Pragmatism, is not known for having developed a normative and ethical theory. His remarks on ethics and normativity are scattered and sparse. There is nonetheless increasing interest in ... -
Controlling Cyberwarfare: International Laws of Armed Conflict and Human Rights in the Cyber Realm
(University of Waterloo, 2021-06-04)Cyberwarfare, military activities in cyberspace conducted by a state against another state and intended to disrupt or destroy computing or communication systems or data, is a recent addition to the warfaring arsenal. The ... -
Crime Prevention in a World without Free Will: Derk Pereboom’s Quarantine Analogy
(University of Waterloo, 2015-09-01)The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Pereboom’s attempt to use his quarantine analogy to justify his theory of crime prevention and the use of preventative detainment in place of punishment. Specifically, I will examine ... -
Deception in Data Visualization
(University of Waterloo, 2022-08-30)In recent years, there has been a great deal of public discussion of misleading graphs and statistics, but this phenomenon seems to have fallen outside the scope of philosophical analysis. The philosophy of language has ... -
A Defense of Semantic Conventionalism
(University of Waterloo, 2007-09-26)The purpose of this dissertation is to argue that semantic conventionalism of a, more or less, Dummettian variety is unjustly neglected in contemporary philosophy. The strategy for arguing this is to make a conjecture ... -
A Defense of the Public Health-Quarantine Model of Punishment in Light of Obligations of the State to the Wrongdoer
(University of Waterloo, 2017-02-22)Punishment is traditionally justified retributively or consequentially; that is, with respect to the desert of the wrongdoer or the positive consequences of the punishment. State-sanctioned punishment (the kind of punishment ... -
The Depiction of Unwritten Law
(University of Waterloo, 2016-12-14)Even though tacit legal norms are deeply important to our past, present, and future, the very idea of unwritten law has been difficult to pin down, and problematic in a range of ways. Existing discussions of the phenomenon ... -
Disciplinary Inequality, Collective Agency, and Interprofessional Collaboration in Health Care
(University of Waterloo, 2015-10-05)In this thesis, I apply collective responsibility theory to the problem of health care inequality between physicians and nurses. This analysis is conducted in the context of physician-nurse interprofessional collaboration ... -
Do Birds Have a Theory of Mind?
(University of Waterloo, 2013-10-04)It is well known that humans are able to represent the mental states of others. This ability is commonly thought to be unique to humans. However, recent studies on the food caching, gift giving, and cooperative behaviours ... -
Does Knowledge Entail Belief?
(University of Waterloo, 2019-04-05)In contemporary epistemology, it is a widely shared assumption that knowledge entails belief: as a matter of conceptual necessity, if one knows that P, then one believes that P. This is known as the epistemic entailment ... -
A Dynamic Account of the Structure of Concepts
(University of Waterloo, 2011-08-31)Concepts are widely agreed to be the basic constituents of thought. Amongst philosophers and psychologists, however, the question of how concepts are structured has been a longstanding problem and a locus of disagreement. ...