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Contemporary theoretical and political approaches have sought to integrate both a material politics of redistribution and a cultural politics of recognition into a relational theoretical framework. Such frameworks consider the intersecting ways individuals and groups suffer from over-determining social inequalities that are rooted in the economic, cultural and political orders of society. In this thesis, I identify approaches that seek to explain the intersection between economic, cultural, and political variables as “integrated” theories of justice. At the forefront of integrated approaches that have cut across disciplinary and epistemological divides, I critically engage with Nancy Fraser’s integrated theory of justice (1995, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005). I also examine similar, yet alternative approaches advanced by Jacinda Swanson (2005) and others that have attempted to reconcile the economy/culture/politics relationship. I argue that while integrated theories of social justice provide a correction to previous “reductionist” and “essentializing” theories of social justice, they do not go far enough to capture the over-determining interconnections between economics, politics, culture, and agency. As a result, they are unable to adequately address the complexity of social inequalities. To address this problem in the literature, I re-work integrated theories of social justice that attempt to reconcile the economy/culture/politics divide through an integration with a realist meta-theoretical approach. A realist approach offers several theoretical, methodological and political gains for recasting complex theories of social justice.

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the boundary between human and other created by virtual worlds in contemporary science fiction novels. After a close reading of the three novels: Surface Detail, Existence, and Lady of Mazes, and the application of contemporary literary theories, the boundary presented itself and led to the discovery of where the human becomes other. The human becomes other when it becomes lost to the virtual world and no longer exists or interacts with material reality. Each of the primary texts exhibits both virtual reality and humanity in different ways, and each is explored to find where humanity falls apart. Overall, when these theories are applied to real life there is no real way to avoid the potential for fully immersive virtual worlds, but there are ways to avoid their alienating effects.

This thesis explores the implications of bearing witness as testimony, and the recuperation of community and identity in the wake of exile. Through a close reading of Elie Wiesel’s The Time of the Uprooted, alongside the theories of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (among others), I argue that a True Testimony cannot exist, and yet despite this fact, there is a necessity to bear witness in the face of the Other. The realization suggests an imperative of a different order—one that steps back from the very notion of truth, to instead accept the impossibility of truth in any act of witnessing. By comparing Wiesel’s metaphysical framework to post-structural philosophies, I am able to blur the lines between an exile’s metaphysical feelings of isolation and strangeness from both others and themselves to the effects of recognizing and accepting that all language is différance.

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El presente artículo académico tiene como finalidad analizar el derecho a la educación y las limitaciones que acarrean en cuanto a la disponibilidad de instituciones educativas y la accesibilidad no solo a través de normas (aunque claramente estas significan una contribución y un avance significativo en el enfoque que le damos), sino también en políticas públicas que aseguren a nuestras personas el pleno ejercicio de este derecho y no solo el derecho, sino el desarrollo de capacidades y destrezas que los alejen de la ignorancia y los acerquen a su realización personal y de la sociedad. Da cuenta al problema estructural que vivimos en nuestro país y abre un debate enriquecedor en el que se pueden cuestionar desde el acceso a instituciones educativas hasta las prácticas sociales que nos hacen vivir en situaciones de desigualdad sistémica. Para explicar este problema nos basamos en la concepción de justicia e igualdad que nos presenta la filósofa política Nancy Fraser entendiendo la justicia igualitaria en dos dimensiones: reconocimiento y redistribución. La intención y el propósito del Estado en cuanto al derecho a la educación deberá ser el de alentar desde la edad más temprana hasta el final de la educación formal a analizar y aprender los valores que como sociedad queremos construir

In 1988, Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser published an article entitled "Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," arguing that this essay would provide a jumping point for discussion between feminisms and postmodernisms within academia. Within this essay, Nicholson and Fraser largely disavow a number of second wave feminist theories due to their essentialist and foundationalist underpinnings in favor of a set of postmodernist frameworks that might help feminist theorists overcome these epistemological impediments. A "postmodern feminism," Nicholson and Fraser claim, would become "the theoretical counterpart of a broader, richer, more complex, and multilayered solidarity, the sort of solidarity which is essential for overcoming the oppression of women" (35). Interpreting "Social Criticism" through a feminist cultural studies model in which texts are understood to be simultaneously constituted by and reflective of their own sociopolitical spaces, I argue that the construction of Nicholson and Fraser's "postmodern feminism" is, first and foremost, neither a postmodernist critique nor a means of overcoming the pitfalls of essentialism and foundationalism. Instead, the construction of this theoretical paradigm can be shown to be complicit with postfeminist discourses, wherein an implicitly patriarchal discourse of postmodernism is called upon to repair the deficiencies of feminisms, deficiencies that postmodernisms, in some ways, helped to bring into view. To provide a conceptual backing for these claims, I move toward an examination of mass culture, surveying the similarities between "Social Criticism" and the film What Women Want. Such a comparison, I suggest, facilitates a better understanding of how "Social Criticism" can be shown to be imbedded in a postfeminist narrative structure in which feminisms are relegated to a discursively subordinate gendered position in relation to postmodernisms. Finally, in what I find to be the most important aspect of this thesis' inquiry, I ask what it means to build a "broader, richer, more complex, and multilayered solidarity" by disavowing second wave feminisms in favor of postmodernisms. I conclude that, in using postmodernisms as a panacea for feminist theories, Nicholson and Fraser curtail what might have been a rigorous interrogation of and direct engagement with second wave feminist theories that would also attend to the phallogocentric underpinnings of postmodern theories. To underline the potential consequences, I turn to a set of televisual and filmic texts including Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives, and The Devil Wears Prada to gauge what their "postmodern feminism" might represent in practice rather than what it entails as philosophy. This juxtaposition of these two differently defined and yet overwhelmingly similar postmodern feminisms, I propose, underscores the potential that Nicholson and Fraser may have instituted a postmodern feminist methodology in which it is possible that feminisms might emerge not as discourses essential for "overcoming the oppression of women" but rather as discourses that can be critiqued into oblivion.

Many applications of neural linguistic models rely on their use as pre-trained features for downstream tasks such as dialog modeling, machine translation, and question answering. This work presents an alternate paradigm: Rather than treating linguistic embeddings as input features, we treat them as common sense knowledge repositories that can be queried using simple mathematical operations within the embedding space, without the need for additional training. Because current state-of-the-art embedding models were not optimized for this purpose, this work presents a novel embedding model designed and trained specifically for the purpose of "reasoning in the linguistic domain".Our model jointly represents single words, multi-word phrases, and complex sentences in a unified embedding space. To facilitate common-sense reasoning beyond straightforward semantic associations, the embeddings produced by our model exhibit carefully curated properties including analogical coherence and polarity displacement. In other words, rather than training the model on a smorgaspord of tasks and hoping that the resulting embeddings will serve our purposes, we have instead crafted training tasks and placed constraints on the system that are explicitly designed to induce the properties we seek. The resulting embeddings perform competitively on the SemEval 2013 benchmark and outperform state-of- the-art models on two key semantic discernment tasks introduced in Chapter 8.The ultimate goal of this research is to empower agents to reason about low level behaviors in order to fulfill abstract natural language instructions in an autonomous fashion. An agent equipped with an embedding space of sucient caliber could potentially reason about new situations based on their similarity to past experience, facilitating knowledge transfer and one-shot learning. As our embedding model continues to improve, we hope to see these and other abilities become a reality.

Science fiction is particularly apt as bioethical thought experiment. In considering the theories of James R. Brown, John D. Norton and Marco Buzzoni, I suggest that mental-modeling theories afford the best explanation for what thought experiments can do. I propose a version of mental modeling that has the flexible modalities of experience found in Nancy J. Nersessian's account, combined with Nenad Miš?evi?'s compelling vision of how existing knowledge is used to create mental models, and Tamar Gendler's use of schemas to understand ethical thought experiments. Bioethics makes use of thought experiments' capacity to move from abstraction to discrete instances. Sometimes thought experiments will be better, and sometimes real cases will be unavailable. Given the cognitive advantages that access to mental models provides, thought experiments will be of use in the field of bioethics. To identify literature that is thought-experimental I look to Geordie McComb's family resemblance theory, and consider accounts of literary thought experiments by Noel Carroll and Edward Davenport. Extended narratives will in some cases be more useful for ethical understanding than philosophical thought experiments. Science fiction has this same advantage: as ethical narrative it is detailed and humanized. In addition the specula-tive nature of science fiction lends itself to the exploration of new and emerging sciences and technologies including those in the field of bioethics.