Browsing Philosophy (Theses and Dissertations) by Date of Publication
Now showing items 1-20 of 41
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Freud's psychoanalysis of religion
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2000)Freud was part of a long tradition of non-believers who offered a story about how religions originated. Notable works in this tradition include Hume's The Natural History of Religion and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity. ... -
Language, displacement and censorship : a philosophical analysis of Sigmund Freud's common-sense method of dream-interpretation
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2002)This thesis is a contribution to the tradition in philosophy of psychoanalysis in analytic philosophy of viewing Sigmund Freud's method of interpretation as an extension of common-sense psychology. The thesis addresses the ... -
Weakness of will and practical reason
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2004)This thesis argues that a correct understanding of weakness of will (that is, freely failing to act as one thinks one has most reason to act) is crucial to a correct understanding of practical reason. Central to a theory ... -
Anscombe's philosophy of action and its origins
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2006)G. E. M. Anscombe's work is seminal to action theory. Her major work in this area, Intention, first published in 1957, has been very influential in shaping the modern debate on issues such as the nature of action, the ... -
On the disunity of the sciences and Ceteris Paribus laws
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2006)This thesis examines the claim that the sciences are disunified. Chapter 1 outlines and introduces different accounts of the stratification of the sciences in the literature, in particular, Unificationism, Disunificationism, ... -
Quine between Russell's extreme realism and Carnap's extreme relativism : a coherent alternative?
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2006)In the philosophical literature of the past century few if any philosophers present a greater wealth of ideas or pose more important problems than W. V. Quine. In spite of the diversity of his contributions to philosophy, ... -
The Schreber case : towards a philosophical construction of madness
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2009)Daniel Paul Schreber, lawyer and judge, is better known as a "psychiatric patient par excellence". Schreber's case is also interesting in terms of the debate as to what constitutes health and what, disease. The three main ... -
Kant's realism. An investigation into the essential interdependence of the formal and material conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge in Kant's epistemology
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2009)My central claim in this dissertation is that in Kant's epistemology (1) the conditions for the possibility of empirical knowledge (CPEK) comprise not only formal but also material conditions, i.e. CPEK = FCPK and MCPK, ... -
Idealist philosophy of space : Kant's criticism of Berkeley
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2009)In this thesis I have argued that Kant and Berkeley both took our experience of things in space to be real and veridical. Further, and what I take to be the most striking conclusion from this thesis, is that in fact these ... -
A world of modal states of affairs: an account of the metaphysics of De Re modality
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2009) -
Kant on the possibility of action from duty but not in accordance with duty
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2010)The central theme of this study is a curious and controversial feature of Kant's account of acting from duty in the Groundwork:, his apparent omission of the possibility of action from duty but not in accordance with duty. -
Infinite emotion : Matte Blanco's bi-logic in psychoanalytic context
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2010)This thesis attempts to outline and assess Matte Blanco's theory of bilogic, and place it in psychoanalytic context using comparative analysis. Bilogic is studied in relation to Freud, Klein and Bion. These particular ps ... -
The metaphysics of 18th century natural religion
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2011)The main focus of this dissertation concerns the influence that Malebranche's conception of causation, which understands causal power in terms of absolute necessity, had upon the writings of George Berkeley and David Hume, ... -
Wittgenstein and scepticism about meaning and rule-following : a Kripkean reading
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2011)In this thesis, I propose a defence of Saul Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's later discussion of meaning and rule-following. The most striking feature of Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (WRPL) ... -
Radical minimalism and the possibility of a context-free semantics
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)This thesis explores the nature of the distinction between two types of meaningful content associated with human language: context-free linguistic content and pragmatically enriched communicated content. -
Kant, Cantor, and the unconditioned
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)In this thesis I inquire into the possible connections between the philosophical problem that Immanuel Kant called the First Antinomy of Pure Reason and some of the paradoxes that were discovered in set theory in the second ... -
Relativism about truth : a critique
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)This thesis examines John MacFarlane's attempt to make sense of relative truth, but concludes by rejecting the coherence of such an attempt, on the grounds that it fails to adequately address a problem that was posed by ... -
Plato's Theory of Perception
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2012)This dissertation defends the view that in a number of later dialogues (Theaetetus, Philebus, Timaeus, Sophist, as well as, incidentally, the earlier Phaedo) Plato articulates a coherent and systematic account, and thus a ... -
Substantial priority : an essay in fundamental mereology
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2013)Philosophical inquiry concerning the relationship between wholes and their parts (mereology) has occupied center stage in some of the most fruitful periods in the Western philosophical tradition. With the recent resurgence ... -
Falsificationism and Theory Adjudication : a critical rationalist critique of justificationist theories of science
(Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland). Philosophy Department, 2014)My aim in this thesis is to present a critique of the currently dominant approach to this problem, the broad-ranging epistemological position described herein as "justificationism." This critique of justificationism—the ...
