Psychological happiness is a deeply important phenomenon, according to Dan Haybron. So important, he claims, that it’s a central component of the good life. But it isn’t alone at the center: psychological happiness shares that privileged space with something he takes to be far more important: good character. As such, for him, the pursuit of psychological happiness must be compatible with the demands of good character. I aim to show why there is compelling reason to doubt that such compatibility exists. This is how I’ll proceed: in chapter two, I’ll explain Haybron’s conception of psychological happiness. This will include describing the general structure of the phenomenon, identifying its most fundamental aspect, and detailing a couple of constraints that limit its pursuit. In chapter three, I’ll raise a challenge from Martha Nussbaum to those who would, like Haybron, prioritize happiness-seeking in their conceptions of good lives. Building from there, I’ll describe what I take to be a deep problem for Haybron’s account of psychological happiness, a hidden one that would violate one of the constraints on its pursuit. In chapter four, I’ll argue that the solution to Haybron’s problem is incompatible with the pursuit of psychological happiness itself. The fallout will be that on Haybron’s conception of psychological happiness, the pursuit of it can never begin. Finally, in chapter five, I’ll raise a pair of objections to my argument and show how they fail. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 15, 2019. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark LeBar, Professor Directing Thesis; Alfred Mele, Committee Member; Michael Bishop, Committee Member.

The study examined the relationship of Communication Skills training to attitudes toward the self and to rate of learning. Sixty fifth-grade subjects from two public school classrooms were tested twice, before and after treatment, on the Piers-Harris Children’s Self-Concept Scale and a Paired- Associates Learning task. The latter test, administered orally and individually, consisted of ten pictures of common objects. All ten pairs were shown to each subject after which only the first picture of each pair was presented and the subject was asked to recall its picture-associate. The Piers-Harris scale entitled, "The Way I Feel About Myself," a self report instrument, was administered in group form. Fifteen subjects from each classroom were randomly assigned to the treatment group. The remaining thirty subjects became the control group. The subjects in the treatment group were randomly subdivided into six sections of five each (stratified by sex). Each section was arbitrarily assigned one male and one female group leader. The treatment (Communication Skills training) was given in fifteen forty-minute -periods on consecutive school days. It consisted of planned experiential lessons designed to give the subjects opportunities to deal with their concerns in small groups in an environment where a therapeutic relationship could be experienced. The subjects in the control group remained in their own classrooms during the treatment period and were expected to do their usual class work. Three null hypotheses were tested: (1) that fifth grade subjects who have participated in Co1!ll!lunication Skills training will not require significantly fewer trials to meet the criterion of mastery in a Paired-Associates Learning task than subjects who were in a Control group, (2) that fifth grade subjects who have participated in Communication Skills training will not make significantly fewer errors in meeting the criterion of mastery in a Paired-Associates Learning task than subjects who were in a Control group, ( 3) that fifth grade subjects who have participated in Communication Skills training will not report significantly higher scores on the Piers-Harris self-concept scale than subjects who were in a Control group. Hypotheses one and two were accepted. 1-Hypothesis three was rejected at the .001 1evel of' confidence. It was concluded that increased positive acceptance of self in the fifth-grade subjects was significantly related to Communication Skills training. Control group data affirmed that changes in self-concept did not occur within the environment created by conventional teaching methods. While the differences between groups on the learning task were not significant, they were in the predicted direction, when post-treatment scores were compared to pre-treatment scores. Further research, with a 1onger treatment period, may show a more significant relationship between Communication Skills training and Paired Associates Learning.

We commonly attribute to states and other institutional organizations moral duties and obligations. For example, it is widely held that the state has a moral duty to protect its citizens from external threats and (more contentiously) it is claimed that it ought to positively promote the welfare of its members. When we focus on the surface grammar of such institutional duty-claims, we see that they seem to differ from individual duty-claims only with respect to the subject of the claim. Whereas an institutional duty-claim asserts that an institution (e.g., the state) has a duty to do some action a, an individual duty-claim asserts that a particular individual person has a duty to a. For example, we might claim that parents ought to protect their children, or that a particular person, Doe, ought to take better care of his child. Many scholars have argued or at least assumed that institutions are ultimately just collections of individuals, and hence institutional duty-claims can be analyzed in terms of claims about individuals' duties and obligations. Other scholars have rejected this reductive approach to institutional duty-claims as well as the individualist assumption upon which it is premised--viz., that institutions are nothing "over and above" individuals. Instead, it is argued that at least some institutional organizations are moral agents in their own right which have duties and obligations that are uniquely their own. According to this antireductive holist approach, at least some institutional duty-claims resist being analyzed into claims about individuals' duties and obligations. My aim in this dissertation is to clarify what is meant when we assert that the state (or some other institutional organization) has moral duties, and I do so by entering into dialogue with both the reductive individualist and antireductive holist views. In Chapter One I situate and motivate my project by reference to two well-known debates in which claims about the state's duties play an inescapably central role; viz., the debate concerning the propriety of using so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the War on Terror and the debate surrounding the most recent reforms to the health care system here in the United States. Since my aim is to shed light on the meaning of and truth-makers for institutional duty-claims, I devote Chapter Two to the task of clarifying what we mean and imply when we advance duty-claims in what we may assume to be paradigmatic circumstances: namely, those circumstances in which an individual is said to have a duty to do something or another. I then frame the further investigation into the meaning and significance of institutional duty-claims as one which has the aim of revealing whether the phrase 'has a duty' has a univocal, analogous, or equivocal signification across institutional and individual contexts. In Chapter Three I take up the task of characterizing and distinguishing the relevant reductive individualist and antireductive holist viewpoints, considering both historically significant and contemporary versions of each. In Chapter Four I present and critically evaluate a rather influential argument in favor of institutional moral agency, which, if true, would vindicate the antireductive holist approach. I conclude that chapter by arguing that, contrary to the claims made by those who defend institutional agency, we are unjustified in believing that institutions possess those properties requisite for moral agency. Having set aside what I take to be a "best-case" for an antireductive holism, I turn, in Chapter Five, to the task of making plausible the reductive individualist approach. In doing so, I propose that some institutional duty-claims actually resist reduction to claims about individuals' duties and that such claims are thus better understood as claims about the extrinsic value of an institutional arrangement.

The central undertaking of this project is to initiate a phenomenological theory of musical experience. The core views expressed are that musical rhythm is the most fundamental, and the only essential, component of the musical experience, and that the essence of musical experience lies in attending to rhythm as communicative of a sense of time. In the introduction I set out the general phenomenon of musical understanding and argue for the relevance of phenomenological description of basic musical experience for the theory of musical understanding. I continue this work by considering Jerrold Levinson's concatenationist view, and indicate the need for a more adequate characterization of basic musical experience. I then discuss Roger Scruton's attempt to distinguish musical from nonmusical hearing in terms of metaphorical perception and acousmatic listening and conclude that neither provides an essential characteristic of musical hearing. I present the theory and method of phenomenology and trace out what I take to be phenomenologically adequate theories of sound and auditory experience. The heart of the work explores the notion of musical time along with the nature of the experience of rhythm and meter. The first part of the final chapter contains an historical and critical overview of philosophical accounts of the connection between music and the emotions, and the related issue of whether music possesses any "content" beyond sounds and their melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic organization. The second part considers attempts to pursue a theoretical analogy between music and language.

This dissertation is a defense of a particular theory of the metaphysics of time which I call "accretivism", but which is popularly known in a form usually called the "Growing Block Theory". The goal of a metaphysics of time is to incorporate the various aspects of our temporal experience into a single, comprehensive whole. To this end I delineate five aspects of our ordinary experience of time: 1) The Tensed Aspect, in virtue of which objects are presented to us as past, present, or future; 2) The Transitory Aspect, in virtue of which time passes or "flows"; 3) The Durational Aspect, in virtue of which entities have a certain temporal extent; 4) The Structural Aspect, in virtue of which entities are given as being in temporal relations to one another, and 5) The Differential-Repetitive Aspect, in virtue of which things are different from one time to another, and yet there is a certain recurrence of aspects of our experience form one time to another. I contrast the accretivist picture of time, according to which that which is past and that which is present both have ontological status, but nothing which is future has ontological status, and in which temporal passage consists in the coming-into-being of new entities at the temporal edge of reality marked by the present, with the two dominant theories of time in the contemporary literature: 1) presentism, according to which only that which is present has ontological status, and 2) four-dimensionalism, according to which time is to be understood on analogy with spatial dimensions. Accretivism, I argue, is superior to the other two views in virtue of the fact that it gives full status to both the Structural Aspect of Time, for which the presentist has difficulty accounting, and the Transitory Aspect of Time, for which the four-dimensionalist has difficulty accounting. I then defend the accretivist picture against a variety of objections that might be raised to it.

In this essay, I argue for an account of property possession as strict, numerical identity. According to this account, for an entity to possess a property is for that entity to be numerically identical to that property.

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The aim of this dissertation is to show that, if one is committed to the scientific worldview, one is thereby committed to ethical non-naturalism. In the first chapter I offer the reader an outline of the three primary domains of ethical inquiry: normative ethics, applied ethics, and meta-ethics. I commit myself to a meta-ethical thesis--ethical non-naturalism--and contrast ethical non-naturalism with its competitors. In the second chapter I offer a cursory defense of the moral realist's semantic thesis. I offer reason to think the realist has the correct semantic account and argue against the semantic accounts offered by the realist's primary opponents. In the third chapter of the dissertation I argue that commitment to the scientific worldview requires that one think that the methods of the sciences provide privileged access to facts about the external world and I offer a brief sketch of inference to the best explanation--the primary method I will employ in offering a defense of ethical non-naturalism. In the fourth chapter I develop a method for identifying non-natural properties. The method relies heavily on the predictive power that can be gained by the accurate application of predicates. In the fifth chapter I apply the method developed in the previous chapter. The results are mixed. The method fails to demonstrate that there are non-natural moral facts; however, it does demonstrate that there are non-natural normative facts. Using this result as a lemma, I identify a hypothesis--"[H]"--that, if true, would vindicate ethical non-naturalism. In the sixth chapter I rely on [H] to respond to evolutionary criticisms of ethical non-naturalism and argue that, if morality evolved, we have good reason to believe [H]. In the final chapter, I defend the view I have developed from objections arising from the existence of moral disagreement and I argue that [H] provides the best explanation of the existence of actual moral disagreement.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 38-05, Section: A, page: 2854. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1977.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 33-05, Section: A, page: 2427. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1972.