This paper concerns the dominant conceptual or formal accounts of legal rights: the Interest and Will Theories. Section II clarifies the minimal necessary conditions for a rights model to count as a Will Theory. It also explores Kant’s Will Theory of rights and the difficulties posed to it by Hohfeld’s schema of jural relations. Kant has three alternatives: reject the schema’s utility or demonstrate his theory’s compatibility with it via molecularist or basic models of Hohfeldian rights. Although his best option is to disavow Hohfeld, Kant’s theory is ultimately undesirable on other grounds. Section III shall analyze the modern Will and Interest Theories’ biggest weaknesses according to a test proposed in Section I, which should generate bases for preferring one theory to another. It will offer a counterargument to the Inalienability charge levied against the Will Theory, and demonstrate why Interest Theory responses to the Third Party Beneficiary argument are inadequate.

This paper examines two different theories in relation to the optimal modes of public deliberation about constitutional values and the public good in the context of democratic pluralism: Rawlsian Public Reason and Nedelsky’s Enlarged Mentality. I challenge Rawlsian public reason’s claim to epistemic abstinence, autonomy and its claim to reflect a political conception of justice by examining certain contradictory aspects of its theoretical rendition. I argue that significant aspects of the picture of democracy that Rawlsian public reason reflects are unempirical. I argue that Rawlsian public reason’s concept of bracketing moral and religious argumentation from public deliberation is unjustifiable, unattainable and derogates from Canadian constitutional values. I proffer that Nedelsky’s enlarged mentality is preferable as it is more realistic and consonant with Canadian constitutional values. I argue that Nedelsky’s enlarged mentality is facilitative of genuine and meaningful dialogic exchange in spite of difference whilst managing the risk of democratic instability.

This paper concerns the dominant conceptual or formal accounts of legal rights: the Interest and Will Theories. Section II clarifies the minimal necessary conditions for a rights model to count as a Will Theory. It also explores Kant’s Will Theory of rights and the difficulties posed to it by Hohfeld’s schema of jural relations. Kant has three alternatives: reject the schema’s utility or demonstrate his theory’s compatibility with it via molecularist or basic models of Hohfeldian rights. Although his best option is to disavow Hohfeld, Kant’s theory is ultimately undesirable on other grounds. Section III shall analyze the modern Will and Interest Theories’ biggest weaknesses according to a test proposed in Section I, which should generate bases for preferring one theory to another. It will offer a counterargument to the Inalienability charge levied against the Will Theory, and demonstrate why Interest Theory responses to the Third Party Beneficiary argument are inadequate.

This paper examines two different theories in relation to the optimal modes of public deliberation about constitutional values and the public good in the context of democratic pluralism: Rawlsian Public Reason and Nedelsky’s Enlarged Mentality. I challenge Rawlsian public reason’s claim to epistemic abstinence, autonomy and its claim to reflect a political conception of justice by examining certain contradictory aspects of its theoretical rendition. I argue that significant aspects of the picture of democracy that Rawlsian public reason reflects are unempirical. I argue that Rawlsian public reason’s concept of bracketing moral and religious argumentation from public deliberation is unjustifiable, unattainable and derogates from Canadian constitutional values. I proffer that Nedelsky’s enlarged mentality is preferable as it is more realistic and consonant with Canadian constitutional values. I argue that Nedelsky’s enlarged mentality is facilitative of genuine and meaningful dialogic exchange in spite of difference whilst managing the risk of democratic instability.

Aristotle famously claims that we become virtuous by performing virtuous actions. He also recognizes the potential puzzle this claim gives rise to: How can we perform virtuous actions unless we are already virtuous? After all, virtuous actions require virtuous motives – they are performed “for the sake of the noble” – and virtuous motives characteristically belong to virtuous people. Many modern commentators presume that Aristotle’s solution rests upon characterizing the actions of learners as actions that are the right things to do in the circumstances but are not done with virtuous motivation. But this leaves Aristotle with the problem of bridging what I call “the moral upbringing gap” – i.e. the gap between the motivationally-neutral actions of learners and the dispositions to act reliably from a virtuous motive that such actions are supposed to produce. This gap emerges because the weaker the link between the way in which the actions of learners are performed and the way in which virtuous actions are done by virtuous agents, the more difficult it will be to understand how the repeated performance of the learners’ actions produce genuinely virtuous dispositions. The main aim of this thesis is to show that (and how) shame plays a crucial role in the process of moral development as the moral emotion that provides continuity between the actions of the learners of virtue and the corresponding dispositions that those actions eventually yield. My view is that Aristotle understands shame not as mere fear of external disapproval, nor as mere tendency to find pleasure in the noble, but as an emotion responsive to praise and blame and consequently to considerations about the nobility and shamefulness of one’s own actions and one’s character. Understood this way, shame provides learners with the sort of motivation that allows them to perform genuinely virtuous actions before they have acquired practical wisdom and the stable dispositions characteristic of virtuous agents. Shame thus bridges the “moral upbringing gap” by providing the kind of motivation that, when entrenched by understanding, constitutes moral virtue.

The philosophical discussion of conceptual content and linguistic meaning in the 20th century has been dominated by two contrasting approaches - the descriptive-internalist approach, and the causal-externalist approach. Recent semantic models, for example the two-dimensional semantics of Jackson and Chalmers, attempt to integrate these two approaches. In this dissertation I explore a series of puzzles that highlight points at which the resources of these two approaches combined fall short. Particularly, the dissertation is an argument for the claim that facts about a linguistic community can affect the conceptual and linguistic content of individual members of that community, developing insights of theorists such as Quine, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Lewis and Davidson. The study proceeds along two lines simultaneously, as an investigation into puzzles concerning conceptual content on the one hand, and concerning linguistic meaning on the other. The centerpiece of the investigation into linguistic meaning is a proposal for an irreducibly social aspect of linguistic meaning, which I call the ‘public content’ of linguistic terms. This proposal is motivated by the identification of some points at which neither individualist models of linguistic meaning nor the ‘social’ models of meaning currently available give convincing accounts. Drawing on recent developments in social epistemology, I argue that this aspect of meaning is determined by what speakers engaged in discourse would agree on under an ideal process of collective reasoning as the meaning of the terms they use. In the last chapter I attempt to reconcile this model of meaning with the two-dimensional semantic model, arguing for a three-dimensional model of meaning that includes internal, external, and public dimensions. Alongside the discussion of linguistic meaning I explore a series of related puzzles that arise for conceptual content, particularly a new puzzle of referential indeterminacy, and the problem of conceptual error or normativity. I propose and defend solutions to these puzzles that lean heavily on the rational resources of individuals, focusing on the ‘personal level’ contents of thought to resolve puzzles in this domain, and rejecting models that lean on ‘sub-personal’ states such as neuronal, historical, or dispositional states of thinkers.

This dissertation examines a particular quality of emotion experience that has received little attention in contemporary philosophical and psychological studies of the emotions. This is inversely proportional to the significant attention it receives in literature. I will refer to it as poignancy. Poignant emotions, such as nostalgia and the lyrical feelings pervasive in poetry, are emotions about time’s passage, or the fleetingness of things. My inquiry concerns the normative evaluation of such emotion experiences. Episodes of nostalgia and lyrical emotions are typically experienced as profound while they last, but they are also notoriously apt to be dismissed as sentimental, even by those who feel their pull. Sentimentality is a term of censure that exclusively targets emotions and emotionality; if an emotion is sentimental, then something about it is supposed to be false and wrong. But what are the merits of this charge against poignant emotions? When one has a nostalgic or lyrical emotion episode and reproaches oneself for being sentimental, who is correct—the person in the first moment, convinced by the emotion, or the person in the next, who doubts or retracts it? To adjudicate these disputes, we must turn to what I call the standard model of emotion evaluation that has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. This is a normative apparatus that enjoys wide consensus, but it has been built to evaluate the standard stock of examples in the literature, such as fear. Its application to nonstandard cases has not been undertaken. A major task of this dissertation is therefore to analyze poignant emotions in such a way that renders them evaluable on this model. However, once these analyses are in place, it turns out that the normative evaluation of poignant emotions yields surprising conclusions. In spite of their stigmatization, nostalgic aestheticizations of the past are much less vulnerable to the charge of sentimentality than commonly assumed. And lyrical feelings about the fleetingness of things are almost entirely immune to the charge, in a way that risks undermining our critical discourse about such emotion experiences.

In this dissertation, I lay the foundations for the development of a unique ethical theory, titled “Ethical Harmonism,” on the basis of the early Confucian Xunzi’s thought. First, I attempt to understand Xunzi’s fundamental ethical position centered on his thought of the ideal state for humans. Second, I explore the nature of two attitudes that one should develop in order to create and maintain the ideal state for humans. Xunzi’s ethical position is characterized primarily in terms of “the final good” that it requires one to seek to attain. For Xunzi, the final good is a certain holistic state that every human has reason to create and maintain cooperatively, namely what I call “harmony.” Harmony is the ideal state in which all humans form a well-unified whole in such a way that they interact with one another by properly recognizing various kinds of persons and by appropriately responding to each kind. I also provide a preliminary reconstruction of Xunzi’s view by raising questions concerning whether his holistic view can reasonably accommodate part of contemporary individualistic ethical sentiments, especially, that associated with such a notion as human rights. This reconstruction is intended to serve to develop “Ethical Harmonism,” which is a working-label for the most defensible Xunzian position that is currently in the development stage. For Xunzi, the creation and maintenance of harmony depend on all humans’ proper development of two attitudes, qin (love) and zun (respect). For Xunzi, all humans should control their naturally unlimited desire by cultivating love and respect; and, by adopting these two attitudes in interaction with one another, they can jointly bring about harmony in society. I develop theories of these two attitudes especially by clarifying how each of the two attitudes is understood as a distinctive way of responding to certain kinds of person. I further explain how these two attitudes work cooperatively in ways that promote harmony. My study will provide a new systematic interpretation of two central concepts in Confucian ethics that are grounded in love and respect, namely ren (widely translated as humanness) and yi (widely translated as righteousness).

This dissertation is an attempt to understand the role of instruments in the process of knowledge production in science. I ask: how can we trust scientific instruments and what do we learn about when we use them? The dissertation has four parts. First, I construct a novel account of “epistemic possibility,” the possibility of knowing, that captures the dependency of knowledge on action, and I introduce the notion of “technological possibility,” which depends on the availability of material and conceptual means to bring about a desired state of affairs. I argue that, under certain circumstances, technological possibility is a condition for epistemic possibility. Second, I ask how instruments become reliable. I argue that when the material capacities and conceptual functions of a scientific instrument correspond, the instrument is a reliable component of the process of knowledge production. I then describe how the instrument design process can result in just such a correspondence. Instrument design produces the material device, a functional concept of the device revised in light of experience, a measure of the closeness of fit between material and function, and practices of trust such as calibration routines. ii Third, I ask what we learn from instruments such as those used for experimentation and simulation. I argue that in experiments, instruments function to inform us about the material capacities of the object of investigation, while in simulations, instruments function to inform us about the conceptual model of the object of investigation. Fourth, I put these philosophical distinctions into historical context through a case study of Monte Carlo simulations run on digital electronic computers in the 1940s-70s. I argue that digital electronic computers made the practice of Monte Carlo simulation technologically possible, but that the new method did not meet existing scientific standards. Consequently, Monte Carlo design practices were revised to address the worries of potential practitioners.

In this thesis, I present a novel account of scientific modeling that achieves the stability and generalizability of static approaches with the flexibility and practical relevance of diachronic approaches. In this account, modeling is characterized by the use of a similarity relation for the purpose of surrogate reasoning. Many criticisms of similarity are based on the fact that there is no way to objectively assess similarity between two things that share some, but not all, features. This account does not rely on the inherently flawed notion of objectively assessing similarity. Instead, the focus is on subjective assessment of similarity, within the specific context of an agent using the similarity for surrogate reasoning. This account captures the diversity of models while providing coherence among common features and functions, as evidenced by application to a series of interrelated examples in a case study from mid-twentieth century cognitive psychology. The similarity/difference account advocated in this thesis is particularly significant because its demonstrated success, evidenced by the case study, dispels several misconceptions about the study of scientific models. Advocates of static approaches claim that a diachronic approach cannot provide the generalizability necessary for a unified account, but the functional and agent-oriented similarity/difference account proves otherwise. Advocates of practice-based approaches often suggest that imilarity is too restrictive to capture the diversity of scientific models, but the similarity/difference account demonstrates that this concern only applies to a radically naturalized concept of similarity. As part of an agent-oriented account, a non-naturalized concept of similarity can be flexible enough to capture the full range of scientific models. Combining a diachronic approach with the similarity relation usually associated with static approaches results in an account that can circumvent the issues usually associated with either diachronic approaches or similarity alone.