Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item A Better Place to Be: Republicanism as an Alternative to the Authoritarianism-Democracy Dichotomy(2016) Binetti, Christopher; Alford, Charles F; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: A BETTER PLACE TO BE: REPUBLICANISM AS AN ALTENATIVE TO THE AUTHORITARIANISM-DEMOCRACY DICHOTOMY Christopher Ronald Binetti, Doctor of Philosophy, and 2016 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Charled Frederick Alford, Department of Government and Politics In this dissertation, I argue that in modern or ancient regimes, the simple dichotomy between democracies and autocracies/dictatorships is both factually wrong and problematic for policy purposes. It is factually wrong because regimes between the two opposite regime types exist and it is problematic because the either/or dichotomy leads to extreme thinking in terms of nation-building in places like Afghanistan. In planning for Afghanistan, the argument is that either we can quickly nation-build it into a liberal democracy or else we must leave it in the hands of a despotic dictator. This is a false choice created by both a faulty categorization of regime types and most importantly, a failure to understand history. History shows us that the republic is a regime type that defies the authoritarian-democracy dichotomy. A republic by my definition is a non-dominating regime, characterized by a (relative) lack of domination by any one interest group or actor, mostly non-violent competition for power among various interest groups/factions, the ability of factions/interest groups/individual actors to continue to legitimately play the political game even after electoral or issue-area defeat and some measure of effectiveness. Thus, a republic is a system of government that has institutions, laws, norms, attitudes, and beliefs that minimize the violation of the rule of law and monopolization of power by one individual or group as much as possible. These norms, laws, attitudes, and beliefs ae essential to the republican system in that they make those institutions that check and balance power work. My four cases are Assyria, Persia, Venice and Florence. Assyria and Persia are ancient regimes, the first was a republic and then became the frightening opposite of a republic, while the latter was a good republic for a long time, but had effectiveness issues towards the end. Venice is a classical example of a medieval or early modern republic, which was very inspirational to Madison and others in building republican America. Florence is the example of a medieval republic that fell to despotism, as immortalized by Machiavelli’s writings. In all of these examples, I test certain alternative hypotheses as well as my own.Item Action, Perception, and the Living Body: Aristotle on the Physiological Foundations of Moral Psychology(2009) Russo, Michael P.; Singpurwalla, Rachel G. K.; Philosophy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation I show that Aristotle's moral psychology is grounded in his natural philosophy of the living body. Moral psychology studies the ways in which agency and moral responsibility are rooted in the functional structure of the psyche. For Aristotle, the psyche - that is, the soul (psychê) - is unified with the living body, and its functional structure is integrated with the dispositional propensities of the body's material constituents. On account of this, "the soul neither does anything nor has anything done to it without the body..." (DA I.1, 403a 5) Accordingly, Aristotle considers it an "absurdity" of the accounts of his predecessors that "they attach the soul to the body and set it into it, determining no further what the cause of this is or what the condition of the body is..." (DA I.3, 407b 14) However, most contemporary interpretations of Aristotle's moral psychology suffer from essentially this same problem: they interpret Aristotle's explanation of, say, voluntary action or lack of self-restraint (akrasia) in entirely psychological terms, and say nothing about the physiological processes that Aristotle takes to partially constitute, and to critically influence, these phenomena. Here I address this imbalance by exploring Aristotle's view of the somatic dimension of moral psychology. More specifically, I examine Aristotle's so-called "hylomorphism" - the view that a living thing's body and soul are its material and its form (respectively) - and his account of the physiological functions underlying "incidental perception" (roughly, "seeing as" or perceiving particulars under a description), voluntary action, practical reasoning and its role in moving us to act, lack of self-restraint, and moral development.Item ARISTOTLE'S TREATMENT OF THE SOCRATIC PARADOX IN THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS(2009) McBrayer, Gregory A.; Butterworth, Charles E.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation seeks to understand one of the most perplexing statements uttered by the Platonic Socrates, the so-called Socratic Paradox that no one voluntarily does wrong. In such dialogues as the Gorgias and the Protagoras, Socrates famously, or infamously, declared that all wrongdoing is a result of ignorance and is therefore not culpable. While the beginning point for this investigation is Socrates, this dissertation turns for the most part to Aristotle as the first and foremost commentator on the Platonic dialogues, guided by the belief that Aristotle can aid in the discovery of what Socrates' outlandish assertion means. In Books III and VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle takes up the questions on which the Socratic Paradox touches, submitting the so-called paradox to scrutiny in Book VII. While much research has focused on the Socratic Paradox, the contribution of this work is to exploit the intellectual genius Aristotle has brought to bear on this question. Turning to Aristotle will allow us to gain greater clarity into this central tenet of Socratic Political Philosophy.Item For the End is a Limit: The Question Concerning the Environment(2007-06-04) Orhan, Ozguc; Conca, Ken; Butterworth, Charles E.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that Aristotle's philosophy of praxis (i.e., ethics and politics) can contribute to our understanding of the contemporary question concerning the environment. Thinking seriously about the environment today calls for resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions about Aristotle's irrelevance to the environment on historicist grounds of incommensurability or the fact that Aristotle did not write specifically on environmental issues as we know them. It is true that environmental problems are basically twentieth-century phenomena, but the larger normative discourses in which the terms "environmental" and "ecological" and their cognates are situated should be approached philosophically, namely, as cross-cultural and trans-historical phenomena that touch human experience at a deeper level. The philosophical perspective exploring the discursive meaning behind contemporary environmental praxis can reveal to us that certain aspects of Aristotle's thought are relevant, or can be adapted, to the ends of environmentalists concerned with developmental problems. I argue that Aristotle's views are already accepted and adopted in political theory and the praxis of the environment in many respects. In the first half of the dissertation, I explore the common ground between contemporary theorizing on the ethical and political aspects of environmental issues and Aristotelian ethics and politics. The second half of the dissertation locates the contemporary relevance of Aristotle in the recently emerging studies of "environmental virtue ethics" as well as "environmental citizenship" and "conservative environmentalism."