Browsing Philosophy (Theses and Dissertations) by Title
Now showing items 11-30 of 41
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Hannah Arendt's Unwritten Theory of Political Judgment
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2023)This project develops a new reading of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment. The aim of this project is to justify Arendt’s claim that she brings Kant’s unwritten political ... -
Idealist philosophy of space : Kant's criticism of Berkeley
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2009)In this thesis I have argued that Kant and Berkeley both took our experience of things in space to be real and veridical. Further, and what I take to be the most striking conclusion from this thesis, is that in fact these ... -
Ideas, relations, and signs : 'intuition' and 'symbolic substitution'in Berkeley's theory of knowledge of nature
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2014)The chief aim of this thesis is to develop an interpretation of Berkeley's theory of knowledge of nature through clarification of two prominent motifs which underlie it 'intuition' and 'symbolic substitution'. I regard ... -
Infinite emotion : Matte Blanco's bi-logic in psychoanalytic context
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2010)This thesis attempts to outline and assess Matte Blanco's theory of bilogic, and place it in psychoanalytic context using comparative analysis. Bilogic is studied in relation to Freud, Klein and Bion. These particular ps ... -
Kant on the possibility of action from duty but not in accordance with duty
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2010)The central theme of this study is a curious and controversial feature of Kant's account of acting from duty in the Groundwork:, his apparent omission of the possibility of action from duty but not in accordance with duty. -
Kant's realism. An investigation into the essential interdependence of the formal and material conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge in Kant's epistemology
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2009)My central claim in this dissertation is that in Kant's epistemology (1) the conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge (CPEK) comprise not only formal but also material conditions, i.e. CPEK = FCPK and MCPK, ... -
Kant, Cantor, and the unconditioned
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)In this thesis I inquire into the possible connections between the philosophical problem that Immanuel Kant called the First Antinomy of Pure Reason and some of the paradoxes that were discovered in set theory in the second ... -
A Kantian Reconciliation of Moral Realism and Moral Supervenience
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2018)The 'Moral Supervenience' thesis is a deeply intuitive and popular one within philosophy, and can be defined as follows: "There can be no changes in any moral properties without at least some kind of change in non-moral ... -
Language, displacement and censorship : a philosophical analysis of Sigmund Freud's common-sense method of dream-interpretation
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2002)This thesis is a contribution to the tradition in philosophy of psychoanalysis in analytic philosophy of viewing Sigmund Freud's method of interpretation as an extension of common-sense psychology. The thesis addresses the ... -
On the disunity of the sciences and Ceteris Paribus laws
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2006)This thesis examines the claim that the sciences are disunified. Chapter 1 outlines and introduces different accounts of the stratification of the sciences in the literature, in particular, Unificationism, Disunificationism, ... -
Plato's Theory of Perception
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)This dissertation defends the view that in a number of later dialogues (Theaetetus, Philebus, Timaeus, Sophist, as well as, incidentally, the earlier Phaedo) Plato articulates a coherent and systematic account, and thus a ... -
A Pragmatic Bishop: George Berkeley's Theory of Causation in De motu
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2022)In this doctoral thesis, I will argue that in his De motu (1721, 'On motion'), Bishop George Berkeley (c.1684-1753) develops a pragmatist theory of causation regarding mechanical theories outlined previously with Newtonianism. ... -
Quine between Russell's extreme realism and Carnap's extreme relativism : a coherent alternative?
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2006)In the philosophical literature of the past century few if any philosophers present a greater wealth of ideas or pose more important problems than W. V. Quine. In spite of the diversity of his contributions to philosophy, ... -
Radical minimalism and the possibility of a context-free semantics
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)This thesis explores the nature of the distinction between two types of meaningful content associated with human language: context-free linguistic content and pragmatically enriched communicated content. -
The Relation between the What-It-Is and the Why-It-Is in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, On the Parts of Animals, and Metaphysics
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2020)In this dissertation, I wish to examine the relation between the what-it-is and the why-it-is in Aristotle’s three treatises. The main conclusions I will defend in this thesis can be formulated as follows. In the Posterior ... -
Relativism about truth : a critique
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)This thesis examines John MacFarlane's attempt to make sense of relative truth, but concludes by rejecting the coherence of such an attempt, on the grounds that it fails to adequately address a problem that was posed by ... -
A reliabilist-teleological account of Plato's theory of knowledge based on the Timaeus, the Republic and the Theaetetus
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2023)Whether, in Plato's epistemology, the Forms can be grasped without using the inferior epistemic capacities, and whether the inferior epistemic capacities contribute to one's grasp of F-ness and the Form F - These are the ... -
Removing Rubbish and Laying Foundations: Berkeley's Solution to the Sceptical Problem
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2020)In this dissertation, I argue that while Berkeley can and should be characterised as an idealist, an immaterialist, and an anti-abstractionist, he is, above all, an anti-representationalist thinker. My contention is that ... -
Rorty On Religion
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2020)This thesis aims to explore Rorty's pragmatic approach to religion and critically engage with it. In the core of this approach lies his distinction between private and public projects, and his plea for the privatization ... -
Seeking Spinoza: The Spinozistic Origins of Early Psychological Theory in Wundt, James and Freud
(Trinity College Dublin. School of Social Sciences & Philosophy. Discipline of Philosophy, 2019)This thesis investigates the previously unexamined convergence between Spinoza's monistic philosophy of psychology and early psychological theory. It argues that the three 'founding fathers' of the field of psychology, ...