Philosophy PhD thesis collection
The PhD theses in this collection must be cited in line with the usual academic conventions. These articles are protected under full copyright law. You may download it for your own personal use only.
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Abilities, freedom, and inputs: a time traveller's tale
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-06-05)The philosophy of time travel is a sub-field of metaphysics – the study of what there is and what things are like – that considers questions about the possibility of time travel and what a world in which time travel is ... -
Concept is a container
(The University of Edinburgh, 2016-11-28)This thesis puts forward a theory which I call container theory for how a single notion of concept can satisfy the two desiderata that Machery (2009) sets out for concepts: (a) the Judgement Desideratum - a concept must ... -
Analysing time-consciousness: a new account of the experienced present
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-20)This thesis presents a novel theory of temporal experience. While time as measured by the clock is a perennially popular topic, the time of experience remains relatively neglected and poorly understood despite its centrality ... -
Emotion, perception, and relativism in vision
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-10)I defend a position in which affective and emotional reactions are incorporated into visual representations. Such incorporation allows affect, emotion and perception to operate together in a more efficient manner than other ... -
Justice as a point of equipoise: an Aristotelian approach to contemporary corporate ethics
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-25)How can contemporary companies and corporations, necessarily operating within market-derived norms, act justly in their dealings? Why should they care about doing so? I claim in this thesis that Aristotle’s conception of ... -
Asymmetric welfarism about meaning in life
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-20)This thesis is guided by the following question: what, if anything, makes a life meaningful? My answer to this question is asymmetric welfarism about meaning in life. According to asymmetric welfarism, the meaning of ... -
Mindreading in context
(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-19)This thesis concerns mindreading, the ability to attribute mental states to others. The standard conception of mindreading emerged from philosophical debates about our everyday use of mental-state terms and experiments in ... -
Economic attitudes and individual difference: replication and extension
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-16)The work presented in this dissertation primarily focused on two topics. The first was understanding differences in support for redistribution. In this section, we replicated existing research on the three-player two-situation ... -
Mindful love: the role of mindfulness in willingness to sacrifice in romantic relationships
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-05)INTRODUCTION: The well-being of romantic relationships often depends on the degree to which partners are able to sacrifice their own interests to meet each other’s needs when necessary. While enacted sacrifices are not ... -
Embodied metacognition: how we feel our hearts to know our minds
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-23)The aim of the present work is to make a plausible case for the phylogenetic origin of self-knowledge, one which is compatible with a prevalent view about its ontogenetic origin, the social-scaffolding view. Essentially, ... -
Temporal structure of the world
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-09-06)The thesis starts from the position of Ontic Structural Realism, which holds that the world just is structure, and from the ontology of Rainforest Realism in which the only things that exist are (Dennettian) real ... -
Every body’s gotta eat: why autonomous systems can’t live on prediction-error minimization alone
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-29)Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle has been proposed as a definition of existence from which “everything of interest about life and the universe can be derived” (Friston, 2019, p.176). Despite pretensions to a theory of ... -
Radical pluralist theory of well-being: towards a new pluralist conception of welfare
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-06-28)The philosophy of well-being has generally assumed that only a weak form of pluralism could be true about prudential value: one which posits a plurality of constituents of well-being. The main exponent of theories ... -
Shape of subjectivity: an active inference approach to consciousness and altered self-experience
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-04)How should we understand the place of the mind in the natural world? Can the relationship between the contents of consciousness and the underlying mechanisms be identified? This thesis approaches the question of consciousness ... -
Question of Forms of artefacts in Plato
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-07-31)[No Deposit Agreement] -
Socratic challenge: reinventing Socratic irony's educational character
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-08-27)Irony is commonly defined as ‘the use of words that say the opposite of what you really mean, often as a joke and with a tone of voice that shows this’ (Oxford, 2000). Expanding the term’s focus from being merely linguistic ... -
Time of termination
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-04-21)This thesis provides an investigation into whether the viability of the Termination Thesis (TERM) is affected by the kind of theory of time that one adopts. In other words, the chief motivation for this project is the ... -
Truth relativism in metaethics
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-04-20)Metaethical relativism is the view that whether a moral claim is true depends on the standards endorsed by an individual or society. This view is attractive because it allows one to hold that moral claims can be true or ... -
Examination of the problems of false consciousness
(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-03-14)The concept of false consciousness is understood to involve individuals who act in ways that contribute to their own oppression, on the basis of ignorant beliefs that resist revision when confronted with attempts at ... -
Truth of scepticism: on the varieties of epistemological doubt
(The University of Edinburgh, 2021-12-04)This research aims to analyse and investigate the character and philosophical strength of epistemological scepticism and whether contemporary anti-sceptical stances can conclusively refute its threat. It proposes an ...
