Browsing Honours Theses and Postgraduate Coursework by title
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Across the borderlines - Coalitional feminist politics beyond identity and difference
Published 2017-01-01First lines of the Introduction (as abstract not provided): Class and identity politics have long had a vexed relationship. Proponents of ...Thesis, Honours -
Adaptive Preference Formation & Autonomy: Moving towards Respect
Published 2017-01-01First lines of the Introduction (as abstract not provided): This thesis seeks to primarily answer the following question: are adapted preferences autonomous? In pursuing the answer of this question, I am unsurprisingly ...Thesis, Honours -
Can we Build a Superintelligence Without Being Superintelligent?
Published 2017-01-01If we create an entity of greater intelligence to us, a superintelligence, it has the possibility to explode in intelligence, creating more and more intelligent entities. If the intelligence explosion argument holds, then ...Thesis, Honours -
Commonwealth, Conversion and Consensus: An Examination of the Medieval Icelandic Free State and Political Liberalism
Published 2011-01-01Thesis, Honours -
Disobedient Discourse: Mill, ContraPoints, and the Limits of Free Speech Norms
Published 2024-02-02In this paper, I explore contemporary disagreement regarding protests against speakers deemed regressive or bigoted by progressive activists. I do so by examining the rationale, scope, and operation of free speech norms ...Thesis -
Does Sexual Objectification Make Erotic Love Impossible?
Published 2024-01-19Theories about the nature of sexual objectification and its relationship to heterosexual erotic love have largely failed to express why objectification is philosophically important, the relationship between gender and ...Thesis -
Empathy for Prinz of the “Dark Side”
Published 2012-01-01Jesse Prinz has argued that empathy plays no important role in moral judgement, and further that it has a “dark side” which renders it by and large bad for morality. This paper challenges these conclusions and demonstrates ...Thesis, Honours -
A Free Choice to Trust: An Essay on the Necessary Requirement for Freedom of Choice in Interpersonal Trust
Published 2013-01-01In everyday life we are constantly confronted with situations that we think require us to trust. Getting on the bus, depositing a check, or simply buying food from a local street vendor all seem to call upon us to trust ...Thesis, Honours -
FREE WILL HUNTING: A RECONCEPTUALISATION OF VOLUNTARINESS, DURESS AND NECESSITY USING ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS
Published 2012-01-01Jurisprudential philosophers concerned with the question of legal responsibility will be familiar with the problematic category of cases where conduct which would otherwise attract liability is committed as a result of ...Thesis, Honours -
HILARY PUTNAM AND CONCEPTUAL RELATIVITY
Published 2017-01-01First lines of the Introduction (as abstract not provided): In The Many Faces of Realism, Hilary Putnam suggests that although the phenomenon of conceptual relativity has become pervasive in contemporary scientific practice, ...Thesis, Honours -
Iris Murdoch on the role of Art in Moral Perception
Published 2017-01-01First lines of the Introduction (as abstract not provided): Throughout her work, Iris Murdoch often touches on the intersection between ethics and aesthetics, in particular focussing on art’s role in moral perception. As ...Thesis, Honours -
Locked Up & Locked Out: Incarceration & Children's Interests
Published 2024-02-01In this thesis I question the justifiability of the current practice of juvenile incarceration. I argue that children have rights borne out of both extrinsic and intrinsic interests. I suggest that the detained child's ...Thesis -
Metaphysical accounts of modality: A comparative evaluation of Lewisian and neo-Aristotelian modal metaphysics
Published 2012-01-01In this essay I comparatively evaluate two realist metaphysical accounts of modality: David Lewis’ (1986) genuine modal realism (GMR), and neo-Aristotelian modal realism (AMR) as put forth by Alexander Pruss (2011). GMR ...Thesis, Honours -
Moral Discourse: Error-Ridden or Relatively Defensible?
Published 2011-01-01Thesis, Honours -
The Moral Status of Whole Brain Emulations
Published 2017-01-01First lines of the Introduction (as abstract not provided): Artificial Intelligence is going to radically change our world; the only real question is by how much. A number of prominent figures believe that current AI ...Thesis, Honours -
A Naturalistic Theory of Perceptual Representation
Published 2012-01-01I propose a theory of representation concerning the perceptual events that are posited and studied by the cognitive and neuro-sciences. The theory is intended to help explain relationships between the perceptual and executive ...Thesis, Honours -
Neo-pragmatist accounts of truth: Rorty's "ethnocentrism" and Putnam's "internal realism"
Published 2012-01-01This work will discuss a recent series of public exchanges that took place between the two founding figures of neopragmatism, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, regarding truth and its relation to justification. Like the ...Thesis, Honours -
A New Approach to the Coherence Theory of Truth
Published 2013-01-01This paper does not argue that the coherence theory should be the accepted theory about what truth is. It aims, rather, to present the coherence theory of truth in a new light, in a way that sheds understanding on why the ...Thesis, Honours -
Objects, objectivity and idealism: Robert Brandom's analytic Hegelianism
Published 2011-01-01Thesis, Honours -
An offer you can't (rationally) refuse: systematically exploiting utility-maximisers with malicious gambles.
Published 2017-01-10Decision theory aims to provide mathematical analysis of which choice one should rationally make in a given situation. Our current decision theory norms have been very successful, however, several problems (such as Pascal’s ...Thesis, Honours