Bøger udgivet af Pradeep Kandimalla

This concerns what it means to be a person and the role the law plays inbestowing the status of person. The purpose of this dissertation is to further ourunderstanding of how courts in the U.S., and especially the U.S. Supreme Court, havedefined "person" as a legal construct within Constitutional law. In order to achieve this,court decisions concerning the personhood of key entities with a claim to personhood areanalyzed and compared in order to yield a more meaningful understanding of the word"person." The entities studied include slaves, corporations, fetuses, and higher-orderanimals.

The general topic of my thesis is how vision science explains what we see,and how we see it. There are two themes often found in the explanations of visionscience that I focus on. The first is the Distal Object Thesis: the internal representationsthat underlie object vision represent properties of entities in the distalworld. The second is the Transformational Thesis: the function of the vision systemis to transform information that is latent in the retinal image into a representationalformat that makes it available for use by further perceptual or cognitive systems.The ultimate aim of my project is to show that these two themes are in tension,and to suggest how the tension may be resolved.

This thesis is a comprehensive investigation of Russell Kirk's doctrine of the MoralImagination. It focuses especially on the nature of the Moral Imagination as integrative andnon-reductionist, or what Kirk sometimes describes as illative. It explores Kirk's develop ofthis concept as one through which the individual can grasp his fully human nature anddignity, and which makes use of all the important areas of human social interactions and allthe human faculties of knowing, providing man with immersive moral knowledge andsupport. The thesis is significant for its unique focus on Kirk's Christian humanist influences -especially T. S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, G. K. Chesterton, and C. S. Lewis.

Hostile sexism describes attitudes characterising women as deliberately attempting toemotionally exploit men and challenge men's power. Men who endorse hostile sexism oftenemploy negative strategies to reduce any risk of exploitation and feelings of dependence,such as withdrawing from difficult conversations. However, no research has identifiedwhether this occurs due to concerns about depending on women or concerns about dependingon others more generally. My thesis tests how men's endorsement of hostile sexism isassociated with experiences of seeking support across different types of support providers(e.g., men vs. women) and contexts of dependence (e.g., romantic partners vs. non-romanticclose others). Chapter Two tested support-seeking in heterosexual people across a context ofromantic dependence (i.e., relying on a partner; Study 1) and non-romantic dependence (i.e.,relying on friends of mixed genders; Study 2). Across both studies, men who endorsed hostilesexism were more resistant to seek support from people they were more dependent on-butthere was no evidence that resistance emerged more strongly for relationships with women(vs. men). Chapter Three presents an observational study testing links between people'sendorsement of hostile sexism and their patterns of support behaviour from an unknownperson to accomplish a joint task. Results did not reveal any evidence that situationaldependence (i.e., not having the resources to complete a task) was associated with expectedpatterns of support seeking by heterosexual men who endorsed hostile sexism. Instead, menwho endorsed hostile sexism were generally resistant to support when paired with other menrather than women. Chapter Four focused on romantic dependence by testing whetherheterosexual men who endorsed hostile sexism received less support from their femaleromantic partners over time.

Researchers conjecture that rituals have been prevalent in human activities for millenniadue to tacit evolutionary functions of solidarity and cooperation. A key element ofritualistic behaviours is synchrony, defined as the matching of actions in time withothers. Synchrony has been associated with a range of phenomena, including increasedaffiliation, connectedness, and cooperation among group members. However, there havebeen a number of failed replications of key studies. Furthermore, synchrony researchhas focused mainly on social and affective responses. Synchrony's effects on cognitiveprocesses remain largely unexamined, even though synchronous actions require socialcognition. In this thesis, I investigate the link between synchrony and creative thinking,a basic and distinctively human cognitive process. This thesis reports four empiricalstudies conducted to investigate two main aims: (1) synthesise existing synchronyliterature to determine synchrony's overall effect on previously studied outcomes; and(2) investigate the relationship between synchrony and creative thinking. The focus oncreativity is theoretically relevant because both sociological speculations aboutsynchrony's role on cultural conformity and real-world observations on reduceddecision quality in highly cohesive groups (e.g., groupthink) suggest that synchronymay have detrimental effects on creativity. To address the first aim, a meta-analysis(Study 1) of experimentally manipulated synchrony studies showed that synchrony waspositively associated (small to medium effect sizes) with prosocial behaviour, socialbonding perceptions, partner cognition, and positive affect. Three experimental studieswere conducted to address the second aim. Study 2 investigated the direct associationbetween synchrony and two components of creative thinking - convergent thinking(i.e., synthesis of ideas toward a single creative solution) and divergent thinking (i.e.,generation of multiple alternative ideas) - and aimed to replicate shared intentionality(i.e., shared goal/purpose) on positive social and affective responses.

Under what conditions do we have inferential knowledge? I propose and defend thefollowing principle: S knows that p via inference only if S knows all the premisesessentially involved in her inference in support of p - "KFK" for short. Eventhough KFK is at least tacitly endorsed by many figures in the history ofphilosophy, from Aristotle through Descartes, and Kant to Bertrand Russell -and,more recently, by David Armstrong - KFK has fallen into disfavor amongepistemologists over the past fifty years. In response to Edmund Gettier's legendarypaper, many have proposed views according to which one's reasoning is asource of knowledge even if one fails to know some or all premises essentiallyinvolved in one's reasoning, while others have given up offering a theory of inferentialknowledge and have focused on reasoning as a source of justified beliefinstead. Unfortunately, these accounts that deal with inferential knowledge areproblematic; they cannot, for example, fully explain our common practice of evaluatingnegatively inferences with unknown premises.

The concept of emergence has found its way back to the mainstream ofphilosophy. The air of mysticism that earlier surrounded the concept has disappeared,and it is no longer considered dubious to use expressions like "emergent properties" or"emergent phenomena".The tradition of British Emergentism that began with John Stuart Mill fadedbefore the middle of the 20th century when positivist and reductionist ideas started todominate the field of philosophy. However, by the 1970s it was becoming clear thatthe reductionist approaches could not convincingly account for mental phenomena.This lead to the development of different nonreductive theories and the return ofemergentism.The most central concept in this new emergentism is irreducibility. The idea isthat although mental properties depend on physical properties and supervene on them,they can never be reduced to them. This idea is also evident in the works of the BritishEmergentists, particularly in C. D. Broad's The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925).The high-flown evolutionary and cosmological theories of the classic emergentiststhat are probably the reason for the bad reputation of emergentism are not a part of thecurrent debate.The most difficult problem that a current emergentist has to face is theproblem of mental causation. The problem is this: if the world is fundamentallyphysical, as emergentism supposes, how can emergent mental properties have causalpowers? If they have a role in causing physical events, it seems that physical eventshave causes that are outside the scope of physics, and physics alone is not enough toexplain all physical events. This is an unacceptable outcome. If emergent mentalproperties don't have causal powers, it is not clear in what sense they exist at all.There is no solution to this problem in sight.

This culminating project examines Byronic heroes using psychoanalytic theory across four casestudies in media, including classic literature, theater, film, and television. The Byronic hero is aliterary archetype inspired by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Typicalcharacteristics include angst, arrogance, cunning intelligence, criminality, desire, passion, dominance,and otherness. The characters I have chosen to study include Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre (1847),the Phantom from the 2004 film The Phantom of the Opera, James Bond from the 2012 film Skyfall,and Damon Salvatore from the hit television series The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017). Throughexamining the actions of these characters through a psychoanalytic lens, I argue that the Byronichero is driven by his experience of intense loss and state of melancholia, as defined by Freud. Whena subject is in a state of melancholia, they have lost an ideal or love object, and they fail to move onwith this intense loss. They become outcasts of society through this loss. In addition to Freud, I alsoincorporate psychoanalytic theories and ideas from Melanie Klein and Silvan Tomkins. The purposeof my study is to examine how Byronic heroes, who are in a state of melancholia, deal with thelosses they have suffered from.

My dissertation defends a modern version of Role Ethics modeled on thefunctioning of human moral psychology, and proposes a novel method for identifying theinstitutional roles of a well-ordered collective. In particular, I defend the view that ourduties are determined by the social roles we incur in the communities we inhabit. Thecompanion project extends Role Ethics into the political domain. I argue that we canidentify the well-ordered collective in roughly the same way we identify the goodindividual, by discerning the dispositions in the relevant agent that are conducive to itswell-being. By scaling up, we shift attention from the moral dispositions of individualsto the moral dispositions of collectives - the institutions that determine the moralcharacter of a population. While philosophers have tended to focus on the formalinstitutions of the state, this research is largely concerned with the 'informal institutions'of a collective, the implicit social roles/practices constructed and enforced endogenously,such as those involved in structuring human friendships. What I call 'CollectiveEudaimonism' is a kind of virtue ethics writ large, a normative theory taskedwith identifying correlations between a set of informal institutions and theindicators of flourishing human collectives.