Non-existence of strong regular reflections in self-similar potential flow

We consider shock reflection which has a well-known local non-uniqueness: the reflected shock can be either of two choices, called weak and strong. We consider cases where existence of a global solution with weak reflected shock has been proven, for compressible potential flow. If there was a global strong-shock solution as well, then potential flow would be ill-posed. However, we prove non-existence of strong-shock analogues in a natural class of candidates

Situating Objectivity: A Feminist Conceptualization

This dissertation focuses on the ideal of objectivity in science. My aim is to understand and situate how objectivity has been conceptualized in the philosophy of science, and to question whether these conceptualizations are consistent with the actual ways in which objectivity has been sought in scientific practice. I examine the dominant views of objectivity in mainstream philosophy of science and feminist reactions to them. Ultimately, I argue that Helen Longino’s understanding of objectivity, complemented by some aspects of Sandra Harding’s “strong objectivity”, provides a more comprehensive and practical ideal to guide scientific practice than the received view’s conception where objectivity is sought by adopting an impersonal methodology. One of the main criticisms against feminist epistemologies, which argue for the gender specificity of knowledge, is that they lead to epistemic relativism. And hence it is argued that feminist epistemologies undermine “scientific objectivity”. In arguing for the fruitfulness and consistency of a feminist account of objectivity, I examine in what ways claims about the gender specificity of knowledge could be understood without rendering the notion of objectivity redundant

Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception

The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work

Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Rhetoric of Assent

“Misreading Skepticism in the Long Eighteenth Century: Studies in the Rhetoric of Assent” revisits the intellectual historical conditions that contributed to the widespread internalization of skepticism as an error-reduction strategy during the Enlightenment. To do so, it abandons a longstanding emphasis the special philosophical tradition of epistemological skepticism associated with the Scottish philosopher David Hume and pursues an alternative intellectual history of Enlightenment skepticism centered on the Anglophone tradition of “constructive skepticism” that informed not only Hume’s skeptical habits but those of other influential Anglophone Enlightenment thinkers more often set in opposition to Hume. “Misreading Skepticism” draws on this tradition of constructive skepticism to generate a much different picture of the character of Enlightenment skepticism than the one extrapolated from radical Humean skepticism: one that is not anxious but assured, not theoretical but pragmatic, not preoccupied with the threat of “radical uncertainty” but resolved to attaining “moral certainty” sufficient to justify belief and action despite irreducible uncertainty. Readings of the philosophy of John Locke, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Dugald Stewart recover the broader Enlightenment project of practical rationality that encouraged the widespread internalization and instrumentalization of constructive skepticism. Readings of eighteenth-century rhetorical and legal treatises trace how this constructive skeptical ethos was disseminated beyond epistemology and embraced within a generalized theory of assent. “Misreading Skepticism” approaches this broader “misreading” in the modern intellectual history of skepticism through the special lens of Romantic literary studies, where scholars have traditionally framed the rise of British Romanticism as a response to a supposed epistemological “crisis” posed by Humean skepticism. “Misreading Skepticism” argues that, to understand the Romantic literary reaction to Enlightenment skepticism, we need to approach the intellectual history of British Romanticism not through Humean skepticism but through constructive skepticism. Readings of Romantic works by William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and other authors demonstrate how these Romantic writers use literary form to interrogate the confident embrace of constructive skepticism within the Enlightenment as a means for managing uncertainty, often by dramatizing or thematizing elements of subjectivity and error that skepticism fails to detect or discipline. Drawing insight from the constructive skeptical tradition as well as Romantic literary critiques of that tradition, “Misreading Skepticism” develops a revisionary account of skepticism that attends to the rhetorical and social dimensions that complicate any epistemological account of skepticism.PHDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144175/1/adsneed_1.pd

The photographic portrait: directions of meaning and the ineffable (1970-2005)

This thesis uses the photographic portrait as an example of contemporary art practice to examine developments in aesthetic sensibility and constructions of meaning with particular address to ineffable qualities in both the subject and in the photograph. It examines the contribution of practice to a wider cultural debate, predominantly described as poststructural. Thomas Ruff's contention that it is impossible to photographically depict an individual, establishes a methodology that interrogates assumptions and directs examination toward reconfiguring issues of theory and practice. In the photographic portrait, what is `essential' equates with the expectation of visual statements that are definitive and what is 'ineffable' is that which transcends words. The persistent premise of capturing the 'essence' is dependant on the notion of 'presence', the certainty of pure perception or essential meaning, now undermined by poststructuralism in terms of conceptions of meaning and authorship. If essential depiction is problematic, how might a correlative adjustment to conceiving and validating photographic meaning be framed? How are essential or ineffable qualities displaced, formed and manifested? What constitutes the contemporary 'meaningful' portrait? Realigned as 'depictions of people', the 'portrait' serves a complex function, adjusted in the light of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism and visibly manifested as metaphor for contemporary consciousness. With particular reference to texts by Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, this thesis demonstrates photographic practice as a form of discourse that visualises implicit truth-values, and participates in debate. It asserts figural interpretations to photographs over literary systems like narrative, and immanent property over aspirations to 'transcendence' or 'essence' and proposes reconfigurations of psychological, critical or poetic 'fiction' as alternatives. It repositions the ineffable as a conceptual domain of possibility that assimilates the dynamic of differance as its poststructural equivalent and proposes a conceptual aesthetic that celebrates aspects of poststructuralism and is rooted in what the photograph provokes rather than what it depicts