Global ETD Search
Search theses and dissertations gathered from participating repositories worldwide. Every result links back to the library that holds it. No account is needed.
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Showing 1 to 20 of 31 for “"Thought experiments"”.
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Finding ourselves : thought-experiments and personal identity
… central concern of this thesis is with the role thought-experiments play in the debate about personal identity, especially with the question of what role they should play. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is a defence of the use of thought-experiments against a number of …
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Siding with Euthyphro : response-dependence, essentiality, and the individuation of ordinary objects
… I start with our practices of engaging in thought experiments about the essences of things and show how my account vindicates those practices.
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Dennettova kritika kválií
… within philosophy are introduced. Then, four thought experiments are presented to serve as an argument in favor of existence of qualia along with Dennett's reaction to these thought experiments. After that, Dennett's criticism of qualia as immediately apprehensible, ineffable, intrinsic and …
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The nature, value and paradoxes of pleasure
… experimental philosophy on experience machine thought experiments is discussed. These thought experiments are addressed because for decades most philosophers have considered them a knock-down argument against Prudential Hedonism. However, in the last decade, the tides have turned and the …
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Imaginative Simulation in the Moral Life
… reasoning can go astray, particularly when using thought experiments, and I provide some guidelines for the use of thought experiments in the development of moral theory. In the final part of the thesis, I show how imaginative simulation provides a new framework for virtue theory and weakness of …
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'The Doors of Perception': Science, Religion, and Literature in Britain's Long-Nineteenth Century, 1789-1914
… and non-fiction explored this issue, offering ‘thought experiments’ regarding religion’s role in society; where texts implicitly or explicitly raise a question, and test it through a hypothetical scenario or scenarios. In accordance with the Linguistic Turn, these thought experiments can be …
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Imagination, content, and the self
… particular, about the content of de se and de re thoughts. Second, I want to formulate an account of this distinction which will help us understand the role these two types of imagining play in philosophical thought experiments about personal identity over time. The first three chapters of this …
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Another World Entire: the Posthumanism of Cormac Mccarthy
Cormac McCarthy's novels are thought experiments in what it might mean to write posthuman works of fiction. In a close reading of three of his novels, Child of God, The Crossing, and The Road , this project reveals how McCarthy's stories paradoxically unravel the dangerous human desire to make of …
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Functionalism and Strange Minds
… Following this the paper argues a number of thought experiments, including discussion on the minds of octopodes, the science fiction mind of "Solaris" and my own thought experiment as "the junkyard mind". In the paper their is discussion of the extended mind thesis as well as …
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Experimental transformation of the perception of colour
… deductions from a particular theory (including "thought experiments" which explore the logic of those deductions), and concrete empirical evidence. The axioms and the theory are those of James G. Taylor. The title of the thesis refers to the general methodology adopted. The term "experimental …
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Fiction, Imagination, Videogames, and Virtual Reality
… philosophers generally employ real cases or thought experiments as examples, I defend the illustrative use of literary fiction in philosophy, as well as novel ways in which thought experiments can be presented through virtual reality.
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Corruption and Central Banks
… and modeling. By extension, central bankers are thought of as benevolent, as decent men and women attempting to maximize societal welfare through their decisions. Yet, cases of central bank corruption abound. The dissertation provides examples of “pure” corruption in central banks. Only a few …
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Anarchy in Critical Dystopias: An Anatomy of Rebellion
… paper is a cross-genre pilot study in Anarchist thought experiments. It is not an attempt to produce an encyclopedic review of the emergence or function of anarchism in critical dystopias. My objective is not so ambitious; my aim is to plot the evolution of each rebellion within its own context. …
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A system-oriented analysis of team decision making in data rich environments
… of decisions made by teams. We then conducted "thought experiments" to investigate the relative contribution of each of these factors to the quality of decisions. Our experiments and subsequent analyses show that while improved data analytics does result in better decisions, human factors have …
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Cyclic universes & direct detection of cosmic expansion by holonomy in the McVittie spacetime
… slow-roll inflation. Part two is titled Thought Experiment to Directly Detect Cosmic Expansion by Holonomy. Two thought experiments are proposed to directly measure the expansion of the universe by the parallel transfer of a vector around a closed loop in a curved spacetime. Generally, …
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The empirical relevance of metaphysics
… belief are often motivated by certain fanciful thought experiments, it has recently been argued that the epistemology of self-locating belief is of central concern to many of the deepest questions in fundamental physics: including the interpretation of quantum mechanics, large-scale cosmology, …
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Death and Value Reignition: Lucky in the Chance to Die
In this thesis I examine life-extension and embodied immortality and ask whether these are intrinsically problematic or undesirable. I examine the history of the concept of immortality and find that the usage of the term has nearly always referred to extended but mortal lifespans. I observe that …
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Health systems thinking : the need for a more critical approach
… consists in two major steps conducting thought experiments in the context of three scenarios from the researcher's own experience. The first step uses Jackson's four major systems approaches and associated methodologies and yields learning about the current state of health systems …
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The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics: An assessment of its fitness for use in Christian theology and apologetics
… interpretation by formulating landmark thought-experiments that aimed to expose absurdities entailed by said interpretation. Chapter 3 examines how scholars and popular-science writers have applied the Copenhagen doctrines to sociology, philosophy, and science. Topics include feminism, …
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Making Sense of Understanding: A Pragmatist Account of Scientific Understanding
… Traditionally, philosophers of science have thought that this is a matter of constructing explanations, based on theories and laws, thereby gaining understanding of phenomena by explaining them. This thesis takes a radically different approach, instead relating the notion of understanding to …
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