Senior Theses Since 2011

Nathan Darmon
Big Tech as Emerging Company-States: A New Framework for Understanding and Regulating American Tech Giants
Advisor: Richard John & Katja Vogt

Oscar Lloyd
The Chatbot Made Me Do It: On Normativity and Reasons in Large Language Models
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Varun Mandgi
Making Something Out of Nothing?: Concerning the Ontological Dependence of Being Upon Non-Being
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Henry Michaelson
Digital Society and Its Future: Social Contract Theory in the Age of Big Tech
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Hunter Odson
The Exorcism of Philosophy
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Oliver Rice
Vasubandhu’s Idealism: A New Approach to an Old Debate
Advisor: Allison Aitken

Samantha Rosen
Bad Faith: The Denial of Dasein
Advisor: Taylor Carman

River Smith
The Dialogues of Our Freedom: An Examination of the Mind-Body Split in Platonic Pedagogy
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan

Peter Guo
Phronēsis and Resoluteness: Practical Reasoning in Aristotle and Heidegger
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan

Tofael Nuruddin
Rethinking Al-Ghazālī Beyond “Decline”: Transformations in Islamic Philosophy After the Tahāfut
Advisor: Souleymane Diagne

Kristupas Pačkaukas
Brave New Leisure: The Challenge of Normativity and Equity in Adapting Aristotle’s Philosophy of Leisure to Modern Times
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan

Rebekah Seow
Shelving Metaphysical Truth: An Investigation of Mādhyamika Buddhists’ Approach to Ethical Disputes
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan

April Wang
Presupposing Credibility: Epistemic & Discursive Injustice and the Prejudicial Failure of Accommodation
Advisor: Melissa Fusco

Judah Altman
Investigating and Applying Sartre’s Progressive-Regressive Method
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Edie Conekin-Tooze
Kantian Accounts of Childhood Revisited
Advisor: Pat Kitcher

Vanessa Feng
Where Are We in the Woods?: Re-examine Heidegger's Critique of the Technological Age Today
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Jake Goidell
Clear Principles and Defined Ends: How Accepting Scarcity Alters Theories of Resource Distribution
Advisor: Axel Honneth & Carl Wennerlind

Monique Iben
On the Human Question: Exploring 'Aesthetic Emancipation' as the Culmination of Marx's Human Emancipation
Advisor: Robert Gooding-Williams

Clara Ence Morse
Reporting on Strangers: How Journalism Shapes Civic Friendship in Times of Injustice
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan 

Juliet Paiva
Lies and the Corrosion of Democracy
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan

Jonathan Tanaka
Tricks of the Trade: Ontology-Ideology and Higher-Order Languages 
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Nicolas Turrill
On the Indeterminacy of Love
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Gokul Venkatachalam
What Can We Say About the Ineffable? The (Non)-Concept of Non-Conceptuality in Indian Buddhist Philosophy
Advisor: Allison Aitken

Anna Connell
Unforeseen Asymmetries: A Contemporary Mathematical Reading of Kant’s Second Antimony
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Kavin Chada
The Synthetic A Priori Noble Truths and Their Foundation of a Practical Philosophy
Advisor: Allison Aitken

Katie Flanagan
What is Left Unspoken: A Philosophical Analysis of Silence and Silencing in Diplomatic Contexts
Advisor: Karen Lewis

Jaden Jarmel-Schneider
Reified Thinking: An Essay on Lukács’ Critique of Kant’s Philosophy
Advisor: Axel Honneth

Woo Joon Kang
To Err is Human; to Forgive… Also Human: An Exploration of How We Can Forgive the Unrepentant Non-Apologist
Advisor: Francey Russell

Petru Rosu
Logical Exotica: A Non-Adjunctive Cure for the Pyrrhonist’s Condition
Advisor: Achille Varzi & Katja Vogt

Jeffrey Daniel Torborg
Inference and Enlightenment
Advisor: Justin Clarke-Doane

Joseph Clateman
Foucault’s Nietzschean Perspectivism and the Practical Possibilities of Foucaultian Criticism
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Nick Gauthier
Not Only Are We Rational Animals, We're Emotional Too: A Starting Place from which to Move Forward Given Trouble Justifying our Best Moral Theories
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Isabel Herburger
Helpful or Harmful: A Linguistic Analysis of the Effects of Labeling Physiological Conditions
Advisor: Karen Lewis

Krishi Korrapati
Why We Should Dare to Feel Our Worst / On the Merit of Emotional Self-Inquisition
Advisor: Francey Russell

Paul Mapara
On the Extensional Indeterminacy of Non-Observational Attributes and Relations
Advisor: Chris Peacocke

Jack Meyer
Towards a Hermeneutics of Justice: Evaluating the Congruence of Political Ends in Rawls and Vattimo
Advisor: Fred Neuhouser

Forest Salpeter
Schopenhauer on Animal Ethics: Time & the Badness of Death
Advisor: Jenann Ismael

Tzar Taraporvala
To What Extent is an Appeal to Natural States a Necessary Condition For a Successful Eudaimonistic Account of Virtuous Behaviour
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Yona Benjamin
Persons, Entities, and the Starting Point of Philosophy: An investigation into Heidegger’s Alleged Philosophical Antisemitism and the Heidegger-Adorno Relationship
Advisor: Axel Honneth

Chiara Caraccio
A Constructivist Conundrum for Constructivist Theories of Value 
Advisor: Justin Clarke-Doane

Daniel Driscoll
Social Constructions and Historical Significance: On the Power of Nature in the Ideology of Poverty Marginalization
Advisor: Christina Mercer

Whitney Fuller
On Conceivability and Possibility
Advisor: Justin Clarke-Doane

Victoria Gross
Developing Bergson’s Metaphysical Philosophy: An Inquiry into Matter and Memory
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Josef Petr Hofman
Interstitial Knowledge
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Eli Lee
The Persistence of the Political
Advisor: Taylor Carman & Mark Lilla

Miyo Peck-Suzuki
Civil Death and Moral Renewal: A Comparison of Criminal Models
Advisor: Michele Moody-Adams

Jacob Snyder
Connect and Serve: Discourse Coherence and the Semantic Content
Advisor: Karen Lewis

Aristotelis Vossos
The Other Euthyphro Problem: Reconciling Partial and Impartial Norms in Plato’s Euthyphro
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Runyang Zhang
Heritage in Being and Time
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Annie Eun Jin Ahn
Why Personal Identity Matters
Advisor: Justin Clarke-Doane & Katja Vogt

Cameron Baxter
Cogito Ergo Eduro: A Response to Radical Skepticism from Inside the Vat
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Jeffrey Chun
On the Standard of Aristotle’s Concept of Human Good
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan

Robert Walker Cohen
Faith v. Reason: Is Kierkegaard a Dialectician?
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Samuel Deng
Methodological Blind Spots in Machine Learning Fairness: Lessons from the Philosophy of Science and Computer Science
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Rachel Dichter
“It” Takes Two on Any View that Is Compatible with Second-Order Knowledge
Advisor: Carol Rovane

Jie Fang
Wozzeck: Could a Poor Man Be Virtuous?
Advisor: Philip Kitcher

James Fast
Becoming the Author: Owning Life through Forerunning Resoluteness and the Eternal Recurrence
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Alexander Garnick
The Mental and the Mathematical as Entangled in Descartes’ Rules
Advisor: Kathryn Tabb & Matthew L. Jones

Gidon Halbfinger
Public Reason in the Supreme Court: Towards a Realist Understanding of Consistency in Constitutional Jurisprudence
Advisor: Michele Moody-Adams

Rumiko Inoue
Nietzsche’s Multifarious Art of Style as Establishing a “Star Friendship” with his Readers
Advisor: Robert Gooding-Williams

Ravi Maddali
On Series-Style Answers to the Special Composition Question
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Katie Mimini
Looking Both Ways: Weber and Nietzsche on Modernity and the Christian Ethic
Advisor: Robert Gooding-Williams

Haejin Park
Hegel’s Understanding and Critique of Stoic Freedom
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Grant Reiter
Dissolving the “Kripkenstein” Rule-Following Paradox: Wittgensteinian Quietism on Meaning and Normativity
Advisor: Akeel Bilgrami

Solomon Wiener
Rorty, Religion, Solidarity: Religious Commitment and the Problem of Pluralism
Advisor: Carol Rovane

Bruce Young
On Passing Time: The Traumatic Delivery of Temporality in Laplanche's General Theory of Seduction
Advisor: Robert Gooding-Williams

Bangwei (Bowen) Zhou
Transcendental Freedom as the Basis of Practical Freedom? The Relation between Transcendental Freedom and Practical Freedom
Advisor: Patricia Kitcher

Nikhil Dominic
The Utility of Utility: The Philosophical Roots and Revealed Limitations of Expected
Utility Theory
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Christopher Durham
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Advisor: Philip Kitcher

Maxwell Fineman
On the Concept of Presence and its Limits: Reading Derrida on Time, Metaphysics, and the Infinite Task of Philosophy
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Danny Haidar
Attention in the Digital Age: Reclaiming Our Minds with Epistemic Virtue and Effort
Advisor: Carol Rovane

Maxwell Hu
Some Considerations Regarding Moral Fictionalism
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Matt Landes
Social Pathology of Reason in Adorno's The Stars Down to Earth
Advisor: Axel Honneth

Yao Li
Why Inequality Matters: An Objection of Equal Concern and Equal Distribution
Advisor: Fred Neuhouser

Hung Nguyen
The Theory of Communicative Action Reconsidered: Eurocentrism and the Future of Social Action in Multicultural Democracies
Advisor: Fred Neuhouser

Joseph Rabinovitsj
Pulling out the Linguistic Rug from Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action: De-Stabilizing Habermas’ Normative Theory of Modernity by Resolving an Ontological Inconsistency in his Formal Pragmatic Semantic Theory
Advisor: Fred Neuhouser

Jonathan Shapiro
There’s an ‘I’ in ‘Science’, but Not in ‘Moral Law’: Moral Universality and Scientific Relativism via Kantian Systematicity
Advisor: Pat Kitcher

Alangoya Tezel
A Lost Tradition: Ultimate Knowledge Through The Body
Advisor: Christina Mercer

Angela Vettikkal
The Ends of Epistemology: The Project of the Nyāyasūtrabhaṣya
Advisor: Dhananjay Jagannathan & Sheldon Pollock

Lauren Burns-Coady
Articulating Agency
Advisor: Akeel Bilgrami

Evan Garnick
Values and Progress in Social Science
Advisor: Michelle Moody-Adams

Jason Ghaly
David Hume's Theory of Ideas: His Foundation and Its Relation to Abstract Ideas, Necessary Connection and the Self
Advisor: Patricia Kitcher 

Mark Gorthey
Negotiating Freedom: Self-Legislation and the Structure of Objective Spirit
Advisor: Frederick Neuhouser

Miranda Litwak
The Construction of the Abnormal: A Study of the Production of Sexual Deviance in the Carceral State
Advisor: Christina Mercer

Karim Nader
On the Columnar Model for Higher-Order Vagueness: Borderline, clear borderline, and borderline clear
Advisor: Achille Varzi

Sarah Pitts
Attachment to Life and Fear of Death in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right
Advisor: Frederick Neuhouser

Bennet Wilcox
Hailing Radicals: On Revolutionary Practice and Organization in Althusser
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Ocean Gibson
Suspension in The Nothing: Seeking the Space of Heidegger’s Angsty Being-in-the-World
Advisor: Taylor Carman

Fabiola Urdaneta
Is There a Duty of Civil Disobedience?
Advisor: Michele Moody-Adams

Jeff Zhang
Socialism in a Workless Society: Reexamining the Thought of Andre Gorz
Advisor: Axel Honneth

Lu Zhou
Maximic Actions, Noumenal Self, and Evil
Advisor: Patricia Kitcher

Virgilio Urbina Lazardi
Ideology, Fetish, and Social Scientific Method in Karl Marx’s Capital
Advisor: Frederick Neuhouser

Daniel Listwa
More Problems than the Newcomb Problems: Extraordinary Cases in Casual Decision Theory and Belief Revision
Advisor: John Collins

Torsten Odland
Senses and Rules
Advisor: Achille Varzi & Akeel Bilgrami

Max Nelson
Lessons in Unlearning: The Educational Work of the Persona in Plato, Kierkegaard and Pessoa
Advisor: Philip Kitcher

Dan Wallace
Do Groups Believe?
Advisor: John Collins

Krishna Hegde
Modern Commodity Consumption
Advisor: Philip Kitcher

Dorothy Chen
Justifying Beliefs Acquired Through Testimony: A Developmental Account
Advisor: Philip Kitcher

Marilyn Gabriela Robb
Democratic Equality and Public Education
Advisor: Michele Moody-Adams

Elizabeth Maier Balough
Melancholy Knowledge: Depression and the Good Life
Advisor: Katja Vogt

Alica Butera
On Unidirectional Freedom in Choices Between Morally Non-Equivalent Options
Advisor: Elliot S. Paul

Betsy Feldman
The Tyranny of Demographic Data
Advisor: Jeffrey Helzner

Sam Preston
Korsgaardian Constitutivism and the Value of the Self
Advisor: Carol Rovane

Jordan Johnson
Radical Interpretation and The Epistemology of Linguistic Understanding
Advisor: Akeel Bilgrami

In Sue Kim
Theories of Explanation and Woodward’s Manipulability Account of Casual Explanation
Advisor: Jeffrey Helzner

Tomas Majcherski
The Proletariat and the Universality of Freedom: Marx’ Theories of Revolution and the Attempt to Explain Necessity
Advisor: Frederick Neuhouser

Robert Niewiadomski
Patenting of Genetic Material: Legal and Ethical Critique
Advisor: Philip Kitcher

Thomas Sun
The Biostatical Theory of Disease Revisited
Advisor: Philip Kitcher

Justin Vlastis
Investigation and Intellectual Seemings in Sextus Empiricus
Advisor: Katja Vogt