This work examines the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and the nonlinear dynamical systems framework for studying cognition. I argue that the nonlinear dynamical systems approach to cognitive science presupposes many key elements of his process philosophy. The process philosophical interpretation of nature posits events and the dynamic relations between events as the fundamental substrate of reality, as opposed to static physical substances. I present a brief history of the development of substance thought before describing Whitehead’s characterization of nature as a process. In following, I will examine the both the computational and nonlinear dynamical systems frameworks for investigating cognition. I will show that the computational paradigm is subject to many of the same criticisms as substance. Conversely, I will show that nonlinear dynamical cognitive science avoids these criticisms and is congenial to Whitehead’s philosophy insofar as it is suitable for describing emergent processes. To conclude, I suggest that the nonlinear dynamical cognitive science confirms and validates Whitehead’s philosophy. Furthermore, I argue that process philosophy is an appropriate characterization of nature for guiding inquiry in cognitive science.

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<p>This thesis aims to develop a principled rationale for coercible environmental protectionist duties, based on Kant’s <em>Metaphysics of Morals</em>, specifically, the <em>Doctrine of Right</em>. The claim of the thesis is not that such a rationale can be directly extracted from Kant’s arguments in that work, but rather that it can be reasonably extrapolated based on Kant’s framework. For Kant, politico-juridical authority, and its exercise via coercion, can be justified only in terms of the requirements of a system of freedom. Accordingly, the only legitimate rationale for coercively inhibiting environmentally destructive activities would be that such activities are, in one way or another, contrary to freedom, or incompatible with a system of Right based on freedom. The Kantian perspective on law and politics, as applied to environmental issues, demands that we ask: in what way do acts of environmental destruction constitute a hindrance, obstruction, or diminishment, of freedom; or, in what way are such acts a defective and transgressive exercise of freedom? The basic aim of this thesis is to answer these questions, and, more specifically, to establish that owners of finite natural resources (especially land) owe duties of forbearance with respect to their holdings, i.e., duties not to destroy or dissipate (or use non-sustainably) such resources. A primary challenge is that, from a Kantian perspective, any such analysis has to be based exclusively on the idea of freedom – as opposed to notions of “harm”, “welfare”, the “public good” or the “intrinsic value of nature”. Kant’s “Juridical Postulate of Practical Reason” furnishes the key to our response: environmentally destructive activity is a hindrance to freedom, and thus transgressive, because it renders usable natural resources unavailable for further use, whereas the postulate actually demands that ostensibly usable objects remain available for use in perpetuity. Further, the permissibility of environmental destruction ultimately entails the permissibility of the annihilation of the material preconditions of any possible exercise of freedom. As such, environmentally destructive acts must be intolerable within a system of Right, and environmental preservation is an imperative of Right.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p> <p>I argue that the relationship between Levinas and Plato is best described as one of inspiration, because both thinkers understand themselves as inspired by a transcendent Good. Levinas’ obscure and frequent citations of Plato have led many scholars to conclude that their relationship is impossible to understand, but I argue that an implicit Platonic inspiration is at the root of each of Levinas’ polemic and descriptive arguments.</p> <p>My method is to map the overlap between Levinas and Plato in <em>Totality and Infinity</em> and <em>Otherwise than Being</em>. Inspiration, as a unifying concept, emerges from this mapping. I also consider Derrida’s demonstration of how difficult it is for Levinas to align himself with Plato. I argue that Derrida has missed the Platonic inspiration at the core of Levinasian philosophy and therefore cannot understand how the two are aligned. For both Levinas and Plato, inspiration puts the thinker’s ability to act in question, and makes the thinker realize his passivity to the transcendent Good.</p> / Master of Philosophy (MA)

<p>My thesis examines how eugenicist and psychologist Robert M. Yerkes’ experimental intelligence research helped to situate the non-human primate as the ideal research subject for human betterment research in the twentieth century U.S. Yerkes believed that the primate was the ideal research subject to address questions of human betterment and social welfare, specifically best to create methods of evaluating the imagined threat of intellectual disability. While Yerkes has been studied extensively in the history of psychology, primatology, and eugenics, rarely have his separate contributions to these fields been placed in conversation with one another. Placing the primate at the center of Yerkes’ work allows for all three fields to engage with one another in a new perspective. By analyzing Yerkes’ publications about the Multiple-Choice Experiment within the context of the American eugenics’ movement, we can see how the primate came to hold a central position in U.S. scientific research, the advancement of human welfare and betterment, and as a means of defining what it means to be human. This story offers a glimpse into this longer process of how the primate came to occupy this position, but even a glimpse offers historians of the American eugenics’ movement new questions. What was the role of the non-human animal in the formulation of American eugenic theories? How have we historically used the natural world in our attempts to separate ourselves from it? And can we truly reconcile a history with eugenics if we continue to ignore the role of animals within it, they who today exist unquestionably within the status of the sub-human?</p>

<p dir="ltr">This dissertation argues that shifting secular conversion therapy practices and theories in North America between 1910 and 1980 consistently relied on both queer affective experience and anti-queer and anti-trans animus to justify often brutalizing medical interventions. Canadian and American conversion therapists’ pathologizing views of queer sexual behavior and gender identity were shaped by complex interplays between cultural, legal, social, and medical perspectives, but predominately worked to uphold heteronormative social structures leading to discrimination, hate, and harm towards queer people in both countries. Focusing on affect thereby encourages scholars to recognize how conversion therapies in all their variable historical permutations are both medical <i>and </i>cultural practices that have attempted to use queer patients’ affective needs for acceptance, love, safety, and validation in ways advancing anti-gay and anti-trans social narratives in purportedly therapeutic settings since the early twentieth century.</p><p dir="ltr">This research uses a transnational approach that is at once sensitive to national differences between the American and Canadian queer experience while looking to draw connections between conversion therapy’s development and individual experiences of this practice in two national contexts over time. It additionally pays careful attention to the ways social power hierarchies based on race and class informed individuals’ affective experiences of conversion therapy between 1910 and 1980.</p>

The Gift 2.0 - A Museological Study of donations of Objects and its Underlying Motives, is a study in order to explain why people choose to donate items for museums, rather than any other alternative.The empirical study consists of qualitative, semi-structured research-interviews conducted with seven selected curators from various museums, with extensive experience of the subject acquisition. I have chosen to only examine Swedish cultural-historical museums. The hypothesis that I assumed was first and foremost that the heritage sphere is what Pierre Bourdieu calls a field. The reason that people would donate objects to museums, is that the donation itself brings cultural capital to the donor, from people with the same habitus. Since I felt that Bourdieus theory of field, capital and habitus could not explain all the reason why people donate items to museum, my second hypotheses was that certain objects are what Annette Weiner called inalienable possessions, objects that at any cost may not be sold or bartered away. It is precisely the ability to keep the object outside of the commercial sphere that is the essential for an inalienable possession. Linked to this hypothesis I argued that museums act like a bastion of inalienable possessions, in which the donor can continue to keep the object while it has been given. My source material consists of the research interviews and secondary material that I have acquired during the study, consisting of literature, deed of gift and e-mail correspondence. I have analyzed both primary and secondary source material using my hypotheses. The results of this study verify that my hypothesis is valid to use as a musicological theory of gifts. The study is a two year master´s thesis in Museum and Heritage Studies.

This thesis focuses on the trajectory of the biomedical concept of virulence from 1880 until the present. Following the concept across disciplinary boundaries, from a longue durée history perspective, it explores how virulence was shaped through two distinct, although sometimes overlapping, “styles of reasoning”. Located at the intersection of several distinct research domains in biology and medicine, the concept of virulence provides, in addition, a window into the complex and changing relations between evolutionary biology and the health sciences (broadly construed) over the past two centuries. Moving back and forth between field experiments and the laboratory, this work examines, through the lens of historical epistemology, the emergence of what I call the molecular and the ecological styles, and their respective conceptual practices. It focuses on the ways in which these styles operationalize the distinction between virulent or avirulent organisms in sometimes opposite sense: Whereas in the molecular (or endogenous) style the expression of virulence is explained by properties of internal structures of the infectious agent (e.g. polysaccharide capsule, virulence gene, or pathogenicity island), the concept of virulence in the ecological (or exogenous) style reflects, in contrast, either a lack of adaptation between two species (avirulence hypothesis) or the existence of one or more ecological compromises between, say, the mode of transmission of a pathogen and its host’s recovery rate (trade-off model). Both styles can be said to originate in the medical bacteriology of the late-nineteenth century, but while the former grew mostly out of the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in Europe, the latter was primarily shaped by Theobald Smith in the United States. Nearly a century later, the introduction of the category of emerging infectious disease within public health discourses in the mid-1990s facilitated a rapprochement between the two styles that had, so far, remained apart. Employing the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic as an example in which to illustrate the trajectory of the molecular and the ecological approaches, the diversity of explanatory schemes developed to account for the pandemic’s exceptional virulence points toward an unresolved, and yet productive, epistemic tension between the two styles, on the one hand, and the intrinsic polarity of the concept of virulence itself, on the other.

Thomas S. Kuhn claimed that the meanings of scientific terms change in theory changes or in scientific revolutions. In philosophy, meaning change has been taken as the source of a group of problems, such as untranslatability, incommensurability, and referential variance. For this reason, the majority of analytic philosophers have sought to deny that there can be meaning change by focusing on developing a theory of reference that would guarantee referential stability. A number of philosophers have also claimed that Kuhn’s view can be explained by the fact that he accepted and further developed many central tenets of logical empiricism. I maintain that the genesis of Kuhn’s meaning theorising lies in his historical approach and that his view of meaning change is justified. Later in his career he attempted to advance a theory of meaning and can be said to have had limited success in it. What is more, recent cognitive science has unexpectedly managed to shed light on Kuhn’s insights on the organisation of information in the mind, concept learning, and concept definition. Furthermore, although Kuhn’s critique of Putnam’s causal theory of reference has often been dismissed as irrelevant, he has a serious point to address. Kuhn thought that the causal theory that works so well with proper names cannot work with scientific terms. He held that conceptual categories are formed by similarity and dissimilarity relations; therefore, several features and not only one single property are needed for determination of extension. In addition, the causal theory requires universal substances as points of reference of scientific terms. Kuhn was a conceptualist, who held that universals do not exist as mind-independent entities and that mind-dependent family resemblance concepts serve the role of universals. Further, at the beginning of his career, Kuhn was interested in the question of what concepts or ideas are and how they change in their historical context. Although he did not develop his theorising on this issue, I demonstrate that this is a genuine problem in the philosophy of history. Finally, Kuhn argued that scientists cannot have access to truth in history because we cannot transcend our historical niche, and as a consequence, the truth of a belief cannot be a reason for theory choice. Instead of truth, we can rely on justification. I also discuss Kuhn’s idea that problem-solving is the main aim of science and show that this view can be incorporated into coherentist epistemology.

This dissertation explores the role and significance of the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus in Western philosophy from Antiquity to today. Paying particular attention to its moral and existential meanings, an analysis of this in-depth investigation produces an overview of the exceptional array of the myth’s functions and themes. It demonstrates that the most significant functions of the Prometheus myth are its social, epistemic, ontological and moral functions and that the myth’s most significant themes are fire, rebellion, creation, human nature and ambiguity. The dissertation argues that this analysis brings to light meaningful information on two sides of a reference to the Prometheus myth: it reveals the nature, functions, themes and connotations of the myth, while information about these functions and themes provides access to fundamental meanings, moral statements and ontological concepts of the studied author. Based on its findings this work claims that, as in history, first, the Prometheus myth will still be meaningful in philosophy today; and second, that the analysis of the myth’s functions and themes will provide access to essential ideas underlying contemporary references to the myth. To prove the validity of these claims this thesis examines the contemporary debate on ‘human enhancement’. Advocates as well as opponents of enhancement make use of the Prometheus myth in order to support their arguments. Employing the acquired knowledge about the myth’s functions and themes, the dissertation analyses the references encountered. The results of this analysis confirm that the Prometheus myth still has a significant role in a contemporary philosophical context. They improve our understanding of the philosophical argument, ontological framework and ethics of the debate’s participants; and thus demonstrate that the information about the Prometheus myth acquired in this thesis is a useful means to reveal fundamental ideas and conceptualisations underlying contemporary (and possibly future) references to the myth.