13th Annual PhilFEST
13th PhilFEST on 04-19-2022
PhilFEST is the highlight of our undergraduate community’s life in which honors students present their research in 15-minute presentations followed by a public Q&A. This year, it returned to being a live-event with a live audience from across the university and including, where possible, families and friends. This year’s event was attended by almost 50 persons, and a resounding success with a fascinating series of presentations that all shared a superior level of accomplishment. The research projects presented were, in the order of appearance:
- Nicholas Corvino: Naked Democracy. From Public to Visible Politics (Supervisor: Prof Cristina Lafont) How transparent should a democracy be? Is it ever OK for a government to lie to its citizens? Is there such a thing as too much information? This thesis digs through the various levels of a political institution to discern the limits and potential of political transparency. In the digital age, we have at our fingertips more political information than ever, but few solutions on how to strengthen its epistemic quality. Making content public is not enough. We need to find a way to make political information more accessible to the people it affects, so that they might actually use it..
- Olive Liu: Defeating the Dragon. Epistemic Violence Against Asian- American Women (Supervisor: Prof Sanford Goldberg) Epistemic injustice, and testimonial injustice specifically, is a type of discrimination that occurs when a person suffers a credibility deficit because of an identity-based prejudice. This presentation seeks to understand testimonial injustice and its relevance to Asian/American women. Through the course of this project, I will explain what prejudices influence acts of testimonial injustice against Asian/American women, tracing both their historical and theoretical roots. I will also discuss the potential effects of testimonial injustice, which consists of two main types of harm: sexual and psychological. Finally, I present the idea of epistemic justice as a counter to epistemic injustice, explaining both how it can be practiced and why it is relevant to larger movements of resistance..
- Justin Jasperse: Conciliatory Civic Friendship (Supervisor: Prof Chad Horne) Although few would dispute the importance of political deliberation, attempts to reform the standards of contemporary political dialogue have not meaningfully addressed the importance of intersubjectivity in addressing political polarization. This presentation critically examines the basis of citizen engagement in active political deliberation in constitutional liberal democracies. This necessitates a genuine pursuit of understanding the needs and demands of fellow citizens made possible through dialogue. I identify a conciliatory form of “civic friendship” as the most effective basis for Rawlsian political liberalism, as the purpose of political deliberation is developing a valuable dialectical relationship with one’s fellow citizens over time.
- Roslyn Valdespino: Relational Equality and Healthcare Access (Supervisor Prof. Chad Horne) In outlining an interpretation of justice which adequately expresses the entitlements citizens can rightly make within a democratic society, much of the current philosophical literature centers around distributive approaches, or those which prioritize fairness in distributional outcomes [1]. However, a more nuanced evaluation of what is actually meant by the term “equality” reveals that the distributive approach seems imprecise [2]. In an effort to better capture what is truly meant by equality–and to therefore further elucidate the rights citizens can reasonably make upon one another–we investigate the hypothesis that a newer branch of political philosophy might be able to better underlie a more prescriptive theory of justice. Specifically, this branch is referred to as relational egalitarianism. Moreover, because relational egalitarianism identifies the fulfillment of equality in terms of prioritizing the maintenance of horizontal social relationships [3], it is better able to motivate principles within a theory of justice which is importantly more resistant to non intuitive/ excessive commitments of socially provided goods. This project therefore seeks to distinguish between the subtleties of the distributive versus the relational approach, and it does so by assessing what each view commits us to in terms of fulfilling their necessary criteria for the achievement of equality. Next, after establishing the merits of the relational approach, we then assess which particular justice-based commitments exist in terms of health and healthcare and ultimately argue in favor of an obligation for basic universal healthcare beyond the scope of the market. With further evaluations of what is meant by equality, we believe that subsequent theories of justice will be better equipped to handle the complex and newly emerging challenges of modern-day bioethical issues, particularly as they relate to obligations in health and healthcare.
- Maxwell Chapin: The Philosophical Therapy of Crime and Punishment (Supervisor: Prof Mark Alznauer) I will attempt to show how Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment explicitly intends to engage in the debate about the value of literature in moral life. And, I will attempt to show how once we conceptualize Crime and Punishment (and literature of this kind) as engaged in Wittgensteinian-style philosophical therapy, and not Platonic moral knowledge-finding through reason, we are able to see how literature of this kind can function as a valuable supplement to the more traditional Platonic-style moral philosophy project. In other words, I will show how Crime and Punishment serves as an archetype of a kind of literature that is intended to and does in fact provide a cure (through philosophical therapy) to a certain moral pathology that arises from the Platonic moral philosophy project.
- Jacob Wright: The Sublime in Eco-Aesthetics (Supervisor: Prof Rachel Zuckert) Aesthetic experiences include the class of things such as the beautiful and the ugly. The sublime is a particular aesthetic experience primarily concerned with powerful objects in raw nature that work to make us feel simultaneously inferior yet elevated. Explanations for this aesthetic contradiction often rely on ecologically worrying foundations such as human chauvinism. I offer a psychologically plausible reconciliation of the sublime with environmentalism insofar as the experience may be categorized by an attitude of respect for nature rather than a superiority over nature.
- Julia Leonardis: Happiness and the Limits of Hedonism (Supervisor: Prof Patricia Marechal) The idea of “happiness” is elusive. As Aristotle notes, everyone agrees that we want to be happy and do well, but people disagree on what happiness involves. The idea of “happiness” is a universal concept, and it is often a generalized utilitarian aspiration. It seems that individuals in our society tend towards embracing hedonistic conceptions of happiness, centered in increasing entertainment, enjoyment, wealth, and recognition as means for personal gratification. Mass media and the internet only exacerbate the allure of hedonistic versions of happiness. However, while people in contemporary, developed, wealthy nations have opportunities to satisfy their pleasure-seeking desires more than ever, rates of depression and anxiety are increasing. Why is this happening if hedonism is satisfactory as a theory of well-being? I will assess the principle of eudaimonia and comparatively review how Aristotelian logic applies to modern and historical principles of happiness and fulfillment, especially relating to: 1) the development of social and economic structures and systems and 2) modern and historical conceptions of hedonism. Doing this, I hope to produce insight regarding the central concerns surrounding a theory of happiness or well-being, with a primary regard for the considerations that a theory ought to hold in order for it to be both intuitive and philosophically sound.