Browsing W&L University Student Scholarship by Subject "Washington and Lee University -- Honors in Philosophy"
Now showing items 1-20 of 60
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Aristotle's Theory of Just Exchange (thesis)
In this paper, I provide an explanation of marginal and equilibrium analysis, analytic techniques from modern economics, and then defend an interpretation of the passage as meaning that an exchange is just when the value ... -
Authenticity, Faith and Love
"The term 'religion' I am using in its broadest sense, meaning thereby self-realization or knowledge of self." Gandhi's simple view of the word 'religion' reveals an important insight about its meaning: religion in its ... -
Beyond Just the Words
Human communication is embodied -- facial expressions, gestures, and prosody (tone of voice and rhythm) add layers of important information to just the words used by a cognitive agent. In fact,just the use of words often ... -
Beyond Just the Words (thesis)
I divide this paper into 5 sections. In section 1, I present viewpoints of prominent scholars like Rene Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, and Paul Churchland on the issue of language, representation, and thought. ... -
"...but what to do with the guilt?" Kantian Autonomy, Heideggerian Authenticity, and Human Lacking
Kantian autonomy and Heideggerian authenticity each have a place in a human life. To show this I must show how the two complement each other and how they differ. To show that authenticity does not conflict with autonomy, ... -
Can an Effective Lawyer be a Morally Upstanding Person? An Examination of Legal Ethics (thesis)
In this essay, I will analyze various scholarly responses to a widely debated question within legal ethics: does the lawyer's role mint permissions to violate ordinary morality? I will begin with a brief introduction to ... -
Conventions, Idiolects, and Malapropisms: A Critical Evaluation of Davidson (thesis)
Donald Davidson concludes his 1986 article, "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs" by making a few seemingly sensational and ambitious claims: "I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything ... -
A Critical Analysis of the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals
The Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, prepared by the National Institutes of Health, provides an interpretation of the Animal Welfare Act. The Guide is the most stringent of the regulatory documents ... -
A De Dicto Solution to the Non-Identity Problem: Why What We Do to Future People Matters Morally (thesis)
When faced with non-identity cases, we intuitively begin to think of our obligation to future individuals in the de dicto sense; yet, these individuals, when considered from a de re perspective, are not harmed due to facts ... -
A Defense of Utilitarianism (thesis)
I will attempt to defend utilitarianism from the demandingness objection. The sort of utilitarianism that I refer to throughout is the consequentialist moral theory that obligates us to maximize well-being. The form of ... -
An Empathy Based Account of Rational Sentimentalism (thesis)
This project is an attempt to argue two things: first, that the Social Intuitionist Model can be used to advance forward a rational sentimentalist framework, and second, that empathy is necessary for both the existence and ... -
Enlightened Anthropocentrism and its Environmental Policy Implications (thesis)
. . . I will now provide a quick roadmap of my thesis. In the first section, I will begin by explaining the notion of anthropocentrism and noting why environmentalists have felt the need to respond by proposing increasingly ... -
Folk Psychology, Parallel Processing, the Intentional Stance, Supervenience, Multiple Realizability, and Some Hard Problems: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Brain
The objective of this paper is to suggest that folk psychology is the most deeply entrenched myth in the history of the human race. Yet, it appears that -- considered as a theory of how the mind works -- we have ample ... -
Freedom and Moral Responsibility in a Deterministic Universe: Perspectives from Buddhism and Clinical Psychology (thesis)
I will be arguing that the concept of an ultimately free agent who takes final responsibility for his actions and desires is inherently incompatible with the dominant western paradigm of materialism and universal causation. ... -
Gesang ist Dasein: Nietzsche, Aesthetics, and Why Art is Worth More than the Truth
What, then, are we to make of Nietzsche's exaltation of art? The goal of this study is to examine why Nietzsche might have declared art to be worth more than the Truth and, with sufficient prudence so as not to attempt to ... -
The Good Life
What is the best life a human being can live? There can obviously be many different answers to this question with many different reasons. However, I would like to take an Aristotelian approach to this question. In order ... -
How to Do Things With Rules
Truth within governing systems can come in two forms: judicial and meta-judicial. Judicial facts arise from verdicts or rulings, whereas meta-judicial facts arise from application of a governing system's standard in a way ... -
How to Meet People: Rehabilitating Particularity and Reciprocity Below Levinas, Heidegger, and Augustine (thesis)
To be clear, my main goal here is to highlight the transcendence in each thinker's work, and to highlight how, consequently, that transcendence distracts attention from a relationship with the concrete other person and ... -
Implicit Imagination in Pathology: Phenomenology in the Abnormal World (thesis)
After briefly elucidating, in more detail, the nature of phenomenology and its use in providing a description of the ‘normal' individual's being-in-the-world, my aims in this project are threefold: (1) To illuminate the ... -
Improving Science -- Insights from Feminist Standpoint and Coherence Theory (thesis)
I will begin with a brief exploration of what science is commonly thought to be, and provide a philosophical schema for choosing between scientific theories. This discussion will introduce the complex nature of scientific ...