Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 468-490). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR46008

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 249-251). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in Philosophy. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-278). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ43452.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Computer Science, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-69).

This dissertation undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the arguments for and against an ontology of momentary temporal parts advanced by a long tradition of Buddhist philosophers in Sanskrit. Drawing on the latest authors in Indian Buddhist schools and using contemporary tools and theories, I defend the Buddhist ontology against the best objections of its Naiyāyika critics, who favor an ontology of enduring substances. The dissertation has six chapters. In the first, I provide an overview of epistemology and ontology in the classical period of Indian civilization. In the second, I discuss how the competing considerations of change and endurance shape the early arguments for and against momentariness. The relationship of properties to property-bearers and of parts to wholes emerges as the central point of contention. In the third chapter, I consider the Buddhist argument that destruction is uncaused. Here the ontological status of absences becomes the crucial issue, and I explain the complex exchanges on this score. In the fourth chapter, I examine the most sophisticated of the Buddhist arguments, an inference based on the thesis that anything that exists has causal efficiency. Causal relations also play a key role in the Buddhist account of the persistence of things as presupposed in everyday discourse. The topic of the unity of a series is continued in the fifth chapter, where I apply Buddhist ideas to the problem of personal identity. Here so-called recognition, our identifying an object as in some sense the same as one previously perceived or cognized, is seen to be the key consideration according to my reconstruction of the classical debate. Especially cross-sensory recognition, seeing now something that one has previously touched, for instance, becomes the central issue. I defend the Buddhist view by giving an account of cross-sensory recognition that countenances no non-momentary entities. In the sixth chapter, I put the Indian dispute into the context of contemporary debates over temporal parts theories. A partial translation of the previously untranslated text, the Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi of Ratnakīrti (an eleventh-century author who may be counted the last of the great Indian Buddhist philosophers), forms an appendix. / text

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This thesis seeks to evaluate the use of the concept "necessity" in the Christian doctrine of God. The concept is used frequently in discussions of God's existence. Traditional theism differentiates between God and the world with specific reference to this notion. God exists necessarily: the world, contingently. Not only is "necessity" used by classical theism in relation to the divine existence, but to God's nature as well. The doctrine of the immutability of God excludes all contingency from his nature. [...]

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No description available.

The thesis defines and examines a position ('natural anti-realism') which combines an anti-realist semantics with an evolutionary epistemology. An anti-realist semantics, by requiring that a theory of meaning be also a theory of understanding, cries out for an explicit epistemological component. In urging an evolutionary epistemology as such a component, I seek to preserve and underscore the semantic insights of the anti-realist whilst deflecting the common criticism that the anti-realist must perforce embrace some form of noxious idealism. An evolutionary epistemology, I argue, can provide a distinctive content for the belief that reality is independent of human thought without needing to claim that anything we can say or think about the world can be conceived as being true or false in full independence of our capacity to know it as such. This content is to be secured in two ways. The first is to observe that language is best understood as a tool of minds which are themselves best understood as the products of a natural process operating in an independently real world. The second is to form a non-transcendent conception of transcendent facts. The accessible evidence concerning the form of the selective process, it is argued, warrants the claim that reality may exceed its humanly accessible contours. For it warrants the claim that man is probably cognitively limited and biased in ways rooted in our peculiar, and somewhat contingent, evolutionary past. The natural anti-realist thus conceives of reality as both independent of, and potentially transcending the limits of, man's particular mental orientation. A largely realistic metaphysics may thus accompany an anti-realist semantics without the lapse into vacuity or incoherence which some commentators seem to fear.