Browsing Philosophy by Date Published
Now showing items 1-20 of 52
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The Issue Of Teleology In Spinoza: A Defence Of The Standard Interpretation
Current scholarship offers two competing accounts of Spinoza’s views on the issue of teleology, which I label Standard Interpretation and Modest Interpretation respectively. Several texts, including Ethics 1 Appendix, ... -
Knowing (from) me, knowing (from) you: Essays on memory and testimony
This thesis is a collection of four related but self-standing chapters about memory and testimony. In Chapter 1, I argue that memory and testimony are analogous because both are reconstructive, incorporating information ... -
A Defence of the Relevance View in Ethics
When different parties have claims on an agent for limited aid, the agent must decide whose claims to satisfy. Individuals’ claims have a certain strength depending on how much they have to gain by receiving aid. To determine ... -
Oughts, Thoughts, and Companions in Guilt: A Defense of Moral Realism
According to the moral error theory, there are no moral facts: all (positive, atomic) moral judgements are systematically and uniformly false. A popular strategy in recent years for arguing against the moral error theory ... -
Developing Transparency Requirements for the Operation of Criminal Justice Algorithms in New Zealand
As predictive risk algorithms become more commonplace so have concerns about their use. The perceived bias, inaccuracy, and opacity of predictive risk algorithms has given rise to concerns about fairness when used in ... -
The Tenability of Meaning Irrealism
The Kripke-Wittgenstein (KW) sceptical argument, presented in Chapter 2 of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), concludes that there are no meaning facts. While realism has been denied for a great ... -
Government Use of Artificial Intelligence in New Zealand
Final Report on Phase 1 of the New Zealand Law Foundation’s Artificial Intelligence and Law in New Zealand Project -
A Defence of Biodiversity as the Goal of Conservation Biology
Biodiversity has been the goal of conservation for thirty years but recent work by biodiversity eliminativists has raised serious challenges to its suitability as the primary goal of conservation. This project groups those ... -
Picking What Persists: Sociocultural Natural Capital and Intergenerational Justice
Attempts to determine the value and intergenerational importance of environmental goods have a difficult time accounting for the non-basic services that ecosystems provide. Discussions of ‘Critical Natural Capital’ deem ... -
Perception and Memory: Beyond Representationalism and Relationalism
This thesis is a collection of five self-standing articles dealing with different issues relating to representationalism and relationalism in contemporary philosophy of perception and contemporary philosophy of memory. The ... -
How Not to Respond to Evolutionary Debunking Arguments
Evolutionary debunking arguments [EDAs] in moral epistemology generally aim to show that what we know or what we have good reason to believe about the impact of evolution on the development of human moral psychology threatens ... -
Twin Earth and the Normativity of Meaning
In this dissertation, I attempt to provide some new evidence in favour of the claim that meaning is normative—specifically, for the claim that semantic judgments or ascriptions of meaning are action-guiding. I attempt to ... -
Locating “I think, therefore I am” in the Meditations
“I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum) suggests a “naïve” interpretation whereby anyone who argues as follows is certain of their existence. I think. Therefore, I am. Curiously, the famous line doesn’t appear in ... -
Composition and Identities
Composition as Identity is the view that an object is identical to its parts taken collectively. I elaborate and defend a theory based on this idea: composition is a kind of identity. Since this claim is best presented ... -
Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s Sceptical Solution and Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language
This thesis is an attempt to investigate the relation between the views of Wittgenstein as presented by Kripke (Kripke’s Wittgenstein) and Donald Davidson on meaning and linguistic understanding. Kripke’s Wittgenstein, via ... -
The Role of Mathematics in Francis Bacon's Natural Philosophy
In this study, I discuss the role of mathematics in Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy. Bacon was one of the important figures of early modern philosophy and has been accepted as one of the frontier philosophers of modern ... -
The languages of relevant logic: a model-theoretic perspective
A traditional aspect of model theory has been the interplay between formal languages and mathematical structures (hence Chang and Keisler's famous equation "model theory = universal algebra + logic"). This dissertation is ... -
Science and Religion: A Conflict of Methods
There is an epistemological conflict between religion and science. While the claims of science are justified using epistemic methods whose reliability has been corroborated by other people and by other methods, the claims ... -
Aspirational Naturalism
In this thesis I argue for aspirational naturalism. Aspirational naturalism is a metaphilosophical thesis that encourages a continuation of the interdisciplinary relationship between philosophy and science. It is a kind ...