Browsing Philosophy by Subject "Philosophy"
Now showing items 21-40 of 79
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The Ethics of Nuclear Waste in Canada: Risks, Harms and Unfairness.
(University of Waterloo, 2010-04-30)The Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) --- the crown corporation responsible for the long-term storage of nuclear fuel waste in Canada --- seeks to bury our nuclear fuel waste deep in the Canadian Shield, with ... -
Everything Is Going to Be Okay, Right? Kindness, Compassion, and the Moral Permissibility of Self-Deception
(University of Waterloo, 2012-09-28)Most people seem to have the intuition that self-deception is always and obviously wrong. In this thesis, I make the case that under certain circumstances, self-deception can actually do a great deal of good and ought to ... -
The Evolution of Reason
(University of Waterloo, 2017-01-17)Aristotle’s metaphysics bridges the gap between mind and nature explaining how their relationship constitutes development in life. Charles Sanders Peirce’s objective idealism similarly aims to investigate how the principles ... -
An Examination of the Moral Authority of Use of Advance Directives with the Alzheimer's Dementia Population
(University of Waterloo, 2010-01-22)Advance directives in Canada are instructions made by capable adults that pertain to future healthcare treatment choices at a time of incapacity. My experience as an ethicist working in an Ontario long-term care facility ... -
Existence Assumptions and Logical Principles: Choice Operators in Intuitionistic Logic
(University of Waterloo, 2015-09-02)Hilbert’s choice operators τ and ε, when added to intuitionistic logic, strengthen it. In the presence of certain extensionality axioms they produce classical logic, while in the presence of weaker decidability conditions ... -
Explaining the Mind: The Embodied Cognition Challenge
(University of Waterloo, 2008-05-15)This thesis looks at a relatively new line of research in Cognitive Science – embodied cognition. Its relation to the computational-representational paradigm, primarily symbolicism, is extensively discussed. It is argued ... -
Exploring the Justifications for Human Rights
(University of Waterloo, 2005)In this paper the concept of a ?human right? is analysed and clarified. Some justifications for human rights ? such as natural rights theory, contractarianism, utilitarianism and rights as vital interests ? are explored ... -
Fairness through Legal Literacy: A Case for Active Involvement
(University of Waterloo, 2012-05-04)This thesis started with one question: “how could we make the legal system more fair for more people?” One possible answer is given to that question in the four chapters that follow: we can achieve a more fair and efficient ... -
Ficino's Efforts to Reunite Philosophy and Religion
(University of Waterloo, 2011-09-12)Marsilio Ficino (1433 to 1499) was the first Renaissance philosopher to have access to the full Platonic corpus. He desired to use these ancient writings, plus faith, scripture, and reason to reunite religion and philosophy ... -
Foundations of Deduction's Pedigree: A Non-Inferential Account
(University of Waterloo, 2010-01-05)In this thesis I discuss the problems associated with the epistemological task of arriving at basic logical knowledge. This is knowledge that the primitive rules of inference we use in deductive reasoning are correct. ... -
From Objects to Individuals: An Essay in Analytic Ontology
(University of Waterloo, 2008-12-05)The brief introductory chapter attempts to motivate the project by pointing to (a) the intuitive appeal and importance of the notion of an object (that is, a “paradigmatic” individual), and (b) the need – for the sake of ... -
Health Care as a Human Right: A Rawlsian Approach
(University of Waterloo, 2008-05-22)This thesis looks at fundamental disagreements about the role of society in the delivery of health care services. In particular, it develops an argument for viewing health care as a human right, and in doing so, argues ... -
How Prejudice Affects the Study of Animal Minds
(University of Waterloo, 2017-08-24)Humans share the planet with many wonderfully diverse animal species and human-animal interactions are part of our daily lives. An important part of understanding how humans do and should interact with other animals is ... -
Human Nature and Morality: An invesitgation of the evidence for and implications of genetically-based moral traits
(University of Waterloo, 2007-09-10)In his recent book, Moral Minds, Marc Hauser claims that humans are genetically endowed with a moral faculty operating in much the same way as our linguistic faculty, and that this faculty delimits normative moral systems. ... -
A Hybrid Theory of Evidence
(University of Waterloo, 2013-10-28)In the literature on doxastic evidence, the phenomenon is regarded as either internal (Plantinga 1993, Feldman and Conee 2001, Turri 2009) or external (Armstrong 1973, Collins 1997, BonJour 2008). Though the specifics of ... -
Igniting the Deontic Consequence Relation: Dilemmas, Trumping, and the Naturalistic Fallacy
(University of Waterloo, 2007-09-27)In this work, Kurt Holukoff examines three formal approaches to representing valid inferences in reasoning regarding obligation and its cognates: deontic logic. He argues that an appropriate formalization of deontic logic ... -
In Defense of Moral Responsibility Skepticism
(University of Waterloo, 2015-10-02)Moral responsibility skeptics have often focused on problems involving determinism in order to defend their position. I argue that this defense of moral responsibility skepticism is misplaced given that what really matters ... -
In Defense of the Systems Reply
(University of Waterloo, 2010-09-29)In John Searle’s Minds, Brains, and Programs, he argues against the possibility of a digital computer capable of understanding. In particular, Searle puts forward the Chinese room thought experiment, which appears to ... -
Individual Human Rights: Reconciling Rights with Value Pluralism
(University of Waterloo, 2007-10-01)Abstract: This thesis examines the foundations of individual human rights. The general thought that informs the discussion is that rights and values are two different kinds of moral discourse. Hence, any attempt to simply ... -
An Inquiry into Mental Variation
(University of Waterloo, 1995)Although there are both common and specialised senses of the term variation, (the OED lists dozens) there seems to be no well defined use of this term in philosophy. The main task of my thesis is to demonstrate that ...