Philosophy Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2799

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    The Metaphysics and Ethics of Copyright
    (2008-04-14) Hick, Darren Hudson; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Copyright, broadly defined, is a legal form of proprietary ownership of authored works, including literary, pictorial, musical, and selected other intellectual kinds. Ideally, one who is familiar with the law should know whether something they have created is protected by copyright (and to what extent), and whether some action they take will infringe a copyright. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Rather, established copyright law gives rise to a host of problems, including legal decisions and established doctrines that are alternatively arbitrary, counterintuitive, and contradictory. My central argument is that these problems arise from a failure in copyright law to recognize the nature of its objects, authored works, and that a coherent and stable approach to copyright must be built upon such an understanding. To this end, I outline an ontology of authored works suitable for grounding both the legal and ethical domains of copyright. Centrally, I contend, a reasonable understanding of copyright depends on grasping four composite dimensions of authored works: their atomic dimension--the parts of which they are composed, and the selection and arrangement of these parts; their causal dimension--their contexts of creation and instantiation, and the weak and strong historical links that connect a given work to others; their abstract dimension--that all such works are best understood as type/token entities capable of multiple instantiation; and their categorial dimension--that multiple works belonging to mutually-exclusive categories can be embodied in the same physical object. On an understanding of these factors, I establish conditions for the copyrightability of authored works, for the infringement of these copyrights, and for the creation of "derivative works." Finally, I consider the right of copyright. First showing how the strongest contenders for grounding this right--the Lockean and Constitutional approaches--fail to align with our understanding of authored works, I sketch an alternative approach--one based on the author's creativity as realized in the authored work--building on the ontological account outlined above, and for establishing the extent of this right, including its duration and when it might be infringed without amounting to a violation of the right.
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    Artistic and Ethical Values in the Experience of Narratives
    (2004-05-10) Giovannelli, Alessandro; Levinson, Jerrold; Philosophy
    The <i>ethical criticism of art</i> has received increasing attention in contemporary aesthetics, especially with respect to the evaluation of <i>narratives</i>. The most prominent philosophical defenses of this art-critical practice concentrate on the notion of <i>response</i>, specifically on the emotional responses a narrative requires for it to be correctly apprehended and appreciated. I first investigate the mechanisms of emotional participation in narratives (Chapters 1-2); then, I address the question of the legitimacy of the ethical criticism of narratives and advance an argument in support of such a practice (Chapters 3-7). Chapter 1 analyzes different modes of emotional participation in narratives, distinguishing between: emotional inference, affective mimicry, empathy, sympathy, and concern. Chapter 2 first critically discusses Noël Carroll's objections to identificationism and to an empathy-based account of character participation, and then analyzes the sorts of imaginative activities involved in narrative engagement, by investigating the distinctions introduced by Richard Wollheim between <i>central</i> and <i>acentral</i> imagining, and <i>iconic</i> and <i>non-iconic</i> imagination. Chapter 3 offers a taxonomy of the possible views on the relationship between the ethical and the artistic values of a narrative, distinguishing between reductionist and non-reductionist views, and sorting the latter ones into <i>autonomism</i> and <i>moralism</i>, <i>radical</i> and <i>moderate</i>. Chapter 4 analyzes the ethical assessment of narratives for (i) their <i>consequences</i> on their perceivers and (ii) the <i>means of their production</i>, and indicates the evaluation in terms of (iii) the <i>ethical perspective</i> a narrative embodies as the kind of ethical evaluation on which an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives ought to concentrate. Chapter 5 critically assesses the accounts of "imaginative resistance" to fiction offered by Kendall Walton, Richard Moran, and Tamar Gendler, and concludes that none of them is adequate to ground an argument for the ethical criticism of narratives. Chapter 6 looks at Carroll's argument for moderate moralism and Berys Gaut's "merited-response" argument for "ethicism," and finds both arguments wanting. Chapter 7 proposes a version of moralism grounded in the notion of a narrative's ethical perspective, and defended on the grounds of narratives' commitments to provide a realistic (or "fitting") representation of reality.