God is often portrayed as being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Many worry that these traits make it so that God cannot possess free will. However, very little is said about why a God without freedom would be an issue. I argue that God does not need the kind of freedom we usually care about. I make a case that free will is important to us because it allows us to assign blame and praise to others. From here, I argue that being able to blame God is unimportant, and that God can still be praised even without free will.

In this paper, I explore the cognitive value of fantasy literature. Using Immanuel Kant's and Jean-Paul Sartre's discussions of the imagination, and J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories,” I argue that fantasy literature is cognitively valuable when it confers phenomenal knowledge. I move on to demonstrate what a work of fantasy literature requires to confer this phenomenal knowledge. Fantasy literature has the potential to reveal true insights into this world when it brings the reader into a state of “secondary belief” and confers phenomenal knowledge through the union of world and story.

Using the interactionist approach of comparative philosophy, I evaluate the intersecting points made in Animal Liberation by Peter Singer and The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol Adams. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a combination of the utilitarian and feminist perspectives helps us adopt a new philosophy accounting for all systems of oppression involved in eating animals. I conclude that by removing unnecessary harm to animals and unlearning phrases with an absent reference to oppressed groups, society can progress toward an anti-oppressive system of liberation.

In this paper, I examine whether John Stuart Mill’s account of free speech can survive three main challenges posed by social media. First, I consider the problem of social media failing to distinguish between emotive and factual language. Second, I look at the problem of algorithms creating moralism. I then turn to a potential objection to my first two challenges. The objection elucidates the benefits of social media’s emotional and algorithmic character, amplifying arguments and increasing public engagement. However, I take issue with this objection on consequentialist terms. I finally return to the third challenge, where I focus on how anonymity removes the consequences to our words; I contend that this final failure is the ultimate reason why Mill’s account cannot persist in the modern age. In conclusion, I argue that Mill’s account cannot withstand the problems posed by social media.

Some views of holism fail to fully encapsulate the structure and independence of consciousness while others are reductionist in their insistence on a strict structure. After examining holism and mental state consciousness, I move to my own proposal for the structure of consciousness: experiential swaths. By highlighting the phenomenal interdependence of some aspects of consciousness without conceding that all aspects are so strongly intertwined, experiential swaths allow for further conceptual structurization within consciousness.

In this paper, I discuss the epistemological injustices that Black women face in academia. I review Patricia Hill Collins’s work, “Learning from the Outsider Within: Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” which details the unique knowledge standpoint that Black women possess. I build upon the ideas set forth by Collins and other scholars to understand how the traditional knowledge validation process is tainted with political implications and harms Black women. I then offer recommendations rooted in alternative epistemology principles to combat the injustices inherent in academia.

Based on Eli Alshanetsky’s work Articulating a Thought, in this paper, I present a reconstructed puzzle involving complex thoughts and a method for how to tackle articulating them. Then, I reconstruct and provide objections to Alshanetsky’s favored view with rationality. I expound on an initially overlooked deflationary view that is arguably much more viable, while also adding a layer of nuance and granularity to the view that affirms its place in solving the puzzle. I reach the conclusion that if articulation is simply a medium for us to express our complex unfinished thoughts, then perhaps it isn’t necessary for us to clarify the thought.

In this paper, I consider Hilary Putnam’s argument for the prima facie acceptance of robotic consciousness as deserving the status of mind. I argue that such an extension of consciousness renders the category fundamentally unintelligible, and we should instead understand robots as integral products of an extended human consciousness. To this end, I propose a test from conceptual object permanence, which can be applied not just to robots, but to the in­numerable artifacts of consciousness that texture our existences.

Buddhist philosophers generally hold that concepts like “I” and “me,” while useful in everyday life, are ultimately meaningless. Under this view, there would be no “agents” because it is meaningless to say “I did so and so….” How do we explain the occurrence of actions without referring to agents? I argue that Cappelen and Dever’s Action Inventory Model (AIM) is a useful resource for developing a Buddhist theory of action. In response to an objection that AIM cannot explain a buddha’s action, I show that a slightly tweaked version of AIM succeeds in explaining how a buddha acts.

I seek to emphasize Immanuel Kant’s lingering and unsavory impact on medical ethics by emphasizing Kantian ethics’ disregard for non-rational humans. We must be considerate when discussing individuals who have some form of dementia, conditions that irreversibly diminish the ability to use rational thought, sometimes to a degree of severity that hinders essential daily functions. I argue that to consider ourselves proponents of human equality we must treat humans with dementia as members of the kingdom of ends.