Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1984. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 267-277).

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I provide in my preface a brief account of my development as a creative writer. Through this development I draw an analogy to the evolution of modern science by stating that my need for personal clarity is analogous to the charge for empirical clarity of modern science. Furthermore, I contrast the objectivism of modern science to the subjectivism of creative writing. The four short stories in my thesis range from a semi-autobiographical story, to two short stories that stem out further and further from the subjective origin of the first story. The story of greatest distance is “Fireflies,” which is not semi-autobiographical, but pure fiction. The final short story returns to the subjective origin of the first. The drive of Distances is thereby to create a sort parabola: a subjective, semi-autobiographical origin, to an objective, purely fictional crest, then a return to that subjective, semi-autobiographical origin. The entire collection is a holistic, ultimately subjective, and therefore personal experience; yet, through the use certain tropes,metaphors others can relate to, the stories are paradoxically sharable.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Advisor: Jaegwon Kim. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-212).

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This thesis is concerned with the philosophical problems of personal identity and personal survival. In the first case, we are concerned to establish what our identity as persons consists in at any instant. In the second case we are concerned to establish what our survival as the self-same (i.e.:numerically identical) person consists in. That is, we wish to know what it means to say that one is the same person now which one was ten years ago or will be ten years from now. I first introduce the distinction between the epistemological question of how we can know these things and the metaphysical question of what these notions actually consist in and claim that much confusion has resulted from the conflation of these two. Further, I explicitly claim that this thesis is intended as a solution to the latter only. I then move on to an historical survey of the major theories of personal identity that have been held since the time of Descartes. After demonstrating how these theories are inadequate, I introduce and explicate the theory defended here which, it is claimed, is a novel one. This novelty consists in the following two distinctions: Firstly, that between persons and sentient beings and, secondly, that between qualitative and non-qualitative psychological relations. It is claimed that sentient beings incorporate the latter in a way which makes them immune to the sorts of contextual problems that typically affect theories of personal identity. Having already established that we are all sentient beings as well as persons, I then claim that the former concept is the fundamental notion of any theory of personal identity and survival. I subsequently consider reductionism, which currently prevails in the field, and conclude that such a position inevitably leads to many counterintuitive results. I then compare reductionism with the theory defended here and conclude that the latter is preferable, since it allows us to explain personal identity without abandoning our intuitions regarding what is involved in these matters. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

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The Kinds of Mathematical Objects is an exploration of the taxonomy of the mathematical realm and the metaphysics of mathematical objects. I defend antireductionism about cardinals and ordinals: the view that no cardinal number and no ordinal number is a set. Instead, I suggest, cardinals and ordinals are sui generis abstract objects, essentially linked to specific abstraction functors (higher-order functions corresponding to operators in abstraction principles). Sets, in contrast, are not essentially values of abstraction functors: the best explanation of the nature of sethood is given by a variation on the standard iterative account. I further defend the theses that no cardinal number is an ordinal number and that the natural numbers are, as Frege maintained, all and only the finite cardinal numbers. My case for these conclusions relies not on the well-known antireductionist argument developed by Paul Benacerraf, but on considerations about ontological dependence. I argue that, given generally accepted principles about the dependence of a set on its elements, ordinal and cardinal numbers have dependence profiles that are not compatible with any version of set-theoretic ontological reductionism. In addition, a formal framework for set theory with sui generis abstract objects is developed on a type-theoretical basis. I give a philosophical defence of the choice of type theory and discuss various questions relating to the nature of its models.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Mavris, Dimitri; Committee Member: Bishop, Carlee; Committee Member: German, Brian; Committee Member: Nixon, Janel; Committee Member: Schrage, Daniel. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.