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<p>This thesis looks at one example of a Bayesian argument for the existence of God in order to evaluate the quality of such arguments. It begins by explicating a general trend in philosophical apologetics towards probabilistic arguments for God's existence, most notably represented in Richard Swinburne's 2004 book, <em>The Existence of God</em>. Swinburne's arguments are presented as the pinnacle of the probabilistic movement. In order to judge the worth of such arguments, I carefully lay out the principles and assumptions upon which Swinburne's case is based. I show that his argument requires both the truth of substance dualism and the valid application of the simplicity principle to a set of possible hypotheses which purport to explain the existence of the Universe. Swinburne depends on the willingness of philosophers to accede to these points. I proceed to show that no agreement exists on the topic of dualism, concluding that Swinburne has a lot of work ahead of him if he wants this assumption to firmly support his argument. I then show that, while the simplicity principle is generally agreed to be a good tool for real-world situations, there are important differences when attempting to use it to adjudicate between hypotheses to explain the universe. The simplicity principle requires both background knowledge and a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive set of hypotheses in order to be properly applied, both of which are here lacking. If I am right, then we will be unable to reasonably assign several values necessary in order to utilize Bayes' Theorem. Thus the Bayesian approach cannot be used for the problem of the existence of God. Finally, I show that Swinburne's own assumptions can be used to generate a different conclusion, which casts further doubt on his methodology.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

This is a dissertation in philosophy of psychiatry and ethics focused on the question of how does one live and react responsibly to the experience of mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. In looking to the current state of psychiatry and cultural understandings of mental disorder, I identify what I call being “epistemically adrift” – the sense that individuals face too many conflicting opinions and a constant debate of how to live with depression that they are unable to process for themselves what their best options for living are. This feeling of being epistemically adrift is all the more complicated by the experience of mood disorder itself, which often makes individuals feel morally inadequate and pressured to do the right thing without clear direction. In the absence of a clear path regarding depression and anxiety, this dissertation proposes an ethics for depression and anxiety disorders – drawing a virtue theory from the existentialist tradition that focuses on the outskirts of mental disorder in order to create an inclusive ethical system for those generally excluded in moral philosophy. The first chapter outlines the general theory of being epistemically adrift in relation to depression and anxiety and how the themes of uncertainty in these conditions inherently lead to different epistemic insights. This chapter establishes the dissertation’s roots in existential phenomenology and epistemic injustice literature in order to sketch out how the combined uncertainty in interdisciplinary understanding of mental illness with the uncertainty experienced within mood disorders lead individuals to feeling adrift and unable to determine what they should do for themselves in living good lives. Meanwhile I argue that the insights of depression and anxiety attune individuals to the world in different ways than their non-depressed peers, which imports interesting questions regarding our responsibility toward one another. The second chapter explores a case study of this sort of insight, arguing that the experience of excessive or “delusional” guilt within depressive disorders can provide a deeper insight into our general moral responsibility towards one another. I compare this feeling of guilt to Karl Jaspers’ conception of “metaphysical” or collective guilt in his analysis of the German people after the Second World War and Holocaust. These sorts of guilt feelings within depression is often incapacitating and hard to make sense of for individuals, but it additionally has a transformative ability to reevaluate moral life. I argue that parallel to the concept of “depressive realism” where individuals with depression have different and sometimes better insights than others, depressive guilt differently attunes individuals to how they relate to others and the world at large. From there, the third chapter engages with how psychiatric diagnosis shapes and limits one’s perceptions of their freedom and agency. More specifically, this chapter employs an existentialist analysis of how one can react to their diagnosis in bad faith – deflecting their own responsibility either by indulging into diagnostic patterns as inherent destiny or denying the condition’s effect on their motivations. I argue that there must be a middle path where one takes responsibility for one’s situation as being depressed or anxious, which both acknowledges the condition but also sees it as a personal challenge to improve on one’s life. The final chapter of the dissertation culminates in the development of an ethical theory that directly centers itself within the experience of mood disorders. This theory stems from both existentialism for its commitment to projecting meaning on uncertainty and absurdity along with virtue theory which allows for a sense of imperfection and improvement over time. I have been developing a set of virtues for how to be responsible for one’s depression or anxiety. “Responsibility” in this sense is the question of how one responds to their moods and other symptoms related to mood disorders, that is, an account of responsibility that resists narratives of fault or blame. These virtues are meant to be a set of therapy-informed guidelines to help those with depression and anxiety counteract the worst feelings of being adrift and foster autonomy and dignity for themselves. / Philosophy

This dissertation studies literary modernism’s philosophies of nature. It examines how historical attitudes about natural environments and climates are codified in literary texts, what values attach to them, and how relationships between humanity and nature are figured in modernist fiction. Attending less to nature itself than to concepts, ideologies, and aesthetic theories about nature, it argues that British modernism and ecology articulate shared concerns with the vitality of the earth, the shaping force of climate, and the need for new ways of understanding the natural world. Many of British modernism’s most familiar texts, by E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells, reveal a sustained preoccupation with significant concepts in environmental and intellectual history, including competition between vitalist, holist, and mechanistic philosophies and science, global industrialization by the British Empire, and the emergence of ecology as a revolutionary means of ordering the physical world. “Modernism, Ecology, and the Anthropocene” uncovers these preoccupations to illustrate how consistently literary works leverage environmental ideologies and how pervasively literature shapes cultural and even scientific attitudes toward the natural world. Through the geological concept of the Anthropocene, it brings literary history into interdisciplinary conversations that have recently emerged from the Earth sciences and are now increasingly common in the humanities, social sciences, and in wider public debates about climate change. The dissertation’s first chapter, “Connecting Earth to Empire: E. M. Forster’s Changing Climate,” argues that E.M. Forster’s fiction apprehends the global implications of local climate change at a crucial time in environmental and literary history. By relating Forster’s Howards End and A Passage to India to his 1909 story, “The Machine Stops,” it attends to the speculative aspects of Forster’s work and presents Forster as a keen observer who foresaw not only the passing of rural England and the arrival of a new urban way of life, but environmental change on a global scale. Its second chapter, “The Call of Life: James Joyce’s Vitalist Aesthetics,” explores the connotations “life” gathers in Joyce’s early fiction and proposes a new reading of his aesthetics that emphasizes its ecological implications by pairing Joyce with his contemporary “modern” vitalism and current new materialisms. The third chapter, “Make it Whole: The Ecosystems of Virginia Woolf and A.G. Tansley,” revises critical conceptions of Woolf as an ecological writer and environmental histories of early ecology by showing how Woolf’s philosophy of nature and Tansley’s ecosystem concept run parallel and represent a shared intellectual project: advocating theories of form and of perception that navigate the tension between holist and mechanistic conceptions of nature and mind. A final chapter, “Landlord of the Planet: H. G. Wells, Human Extinction, and Anthropocene Narratives,” establishes Wells as an early environmental humanist whose ecological outlook evolved with his perception of the rapidly increasing pace of climate change and its threat to the human species. By digging into a rarely-read scientific textbook he co-authored, The Science of Life, this chapter analyzes how the natural world is managed in three Wellsian utopias and traces the development of his writing in concert with ecology. / English

In this dissertation, I explore a selection of recent work in the philosophy and history of experiment, with an eye toward reformulating its focus and redirecting its future path. Specifically, I re-examine a traditional problem in the philosophy of experiment: how to make sense of scientists' attempts to separate experimental “signal” or “entity” from background “noise” or “artifact.” This aspect of the analysis of the practice of scientists—the day to day task of getting one's experimental equipment and techniques to give reliable results that will be accepted by prevailing scientific standards—requires modifications in order to be made compatible with an adequate notion of historiography and with a philosophically and historically tenable view of scientific epistemology. I show that the concept of historical narrative is a crucial, if not primary, construct in answering these questions about interpreting experimental practice. Particular historical narratives, and the historiographies that guide their construction, constitute the crucial evidence for any legitimate view of the epistemological and cultural significance of scientific experimentation. However, narrativity and historiography must be deconstructed before their conceptual significance for experimentation can be evaluated adequately. The metahistorical construct I implement in order to analyze questions concerning scientific experimentation is the technological infrastructure of science.Joseph Pitt's concept of the technological infrastructure of science, a material/cultural network of artifacts and structures that enables and sustains the mature sciences, provides the theoretical foundation for my analysis of experimentation. I extend and refine Pitt's concept of technological infrastructure in order to create a metahistorical tool that researchers in many fields, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Technology, Cultural Studies (of Science and Technology), History of Science, and History of Technology, may utilize when analyzing experimentation. To this end, I develop the technological infrastructure as an incorporation, extension and/or replacement of, for example, Thomas Kuhn's “disciplinary matrix,” Bruno Latour's “network,” Peter Galison's “ short-, middle-, and long-term constraints,” Ian Hacking's “coherence of thought, action, materials, marks,” Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's “experimental system,” Andrew Pickering's “mangle of practice,” and Richard M. Burian's “interaction of mechanisms, of structures and functions, at a great many levels.” / Ph. D.

<p dir="ltr">The concept of infinity plays a pivotal role in mathematics, yet its precise definition remains elusive. This conceptual ambiguity has given rise to several puzzles in contemporary philosophy of mathematics. In response, this dissertation embarks on a rational reconstruction of Hegels concept of infinity and applies it to resolve two groups of mathematical puzzles, including challenges in applied mathematics, especially the application of differential calculus, and the conceptual ground of set theory, especially Cantors paradox.</p><p dir="ltr">The exploration begins with a historical survey of the concept of infinity in philosophy. It becomes evident that a prevailing interpretation characterizes infinity as the unlimited. In addition, this unlimitedness has taken various forms, including endlessness (Aristotle), all-inclusiveness (Spinoza), and self-sufficiency (Kant).</p><p dir="ltr">The heart of the dissertation lies in reconstructing Hegels concept of genuine infinity. Hegel argues that the unlimited as the negation of the limit entails either the completely indeterminate or another limited entity, neither of which is genuinely infinite. Instead, Hegel points out that genuine infinity is the self-relation of a limited entity. By self-relation, Hegel means that the limited entity alters into another limited entity that is isomorphic to the original one.</p><p dir="ltr">Subsequently, Hegel’s concept of genuine infinity can be translated into a mathematical framework as the intrinsic alteration of quantum (roughly speaking, quantum is Hegel’s term for the variable), which is captured by the corresponding relation among quanta. It is argued that this relation serves as the necessary condition for three mathematical entities traditionally considered infinite: arbitrarily large (small) numbers, infinite sets, and endless sequences. Thus, for Hegel, this intrinsic relation among quanta constitutes the essence of mathematical infinity.</p><p dir="ltr">Hegels concept of mathematical infinity can help us resolve difficulties within contemporary mathematics. First, it addresses the question of why infinite mathematical structures can be applied to describe and predict seemingly finite physical phenomena. The application of mathematics is usually explained by the similarity between mathematical structures and empirical systems, but the lack of apparent empirical counterpart leads one to doubt the application of infinite mathematical structures. Hegels concept of mathematical infinity directs us to focus on the structural similarity between infinite mathematical structures and empirical systems, specifically between the intrinsic alteration of quantum and the change of physical properties with time. With this structural similarity, the application of mathematics can be explained. Second, the dissertation investigates the conceptual ground of set theory, especially the relationship between a set and its members. Hegels analysis of genuine infinity provides a twofold clarification: (1) members of set must be a unit first, which entails that the set of all sets (the Universe) is not a set; (2) members of a set are simultaneously distinct (due to their independent logical content) yet indistinguishable (due to their common structure as a unit). Clarification 1 resolves Cantors paradox as it excludes the Universe; clarification 2 explains arithmetic operations.</p>

no / The title The Demons of Science may at first appear like a contradiction in terms. Demons are associated with the forces of darkness; science represents the power of light. One could assume, therefore, that science has no time for demons. This book aims to destroy this assumption. Science opens its gates to demons as long as they play a rational rather than an evil part. They are put to work. Demons are figures of thought: they belong to the category of thought experiments, which are routinely employed in science and philosophy. As they are cast as agents with superhuman abilities, we may expect that demons provide us with valuable—albeit non-empirical—clues about the constitution of the physical world. But I am interested in exploring not only what the demons tell us but also what they do not tell us about our world. They are cast as superhuman actors but even demons have their limitations. The following chapters contain, I believe, the first systematic study of the role of demons in scientific and philosophical reasoning about the external world.