Honors Thesis Projects

Honors thesis students work closely with a faculty mentor to articulate a philosophical problem, conduct a literature review and then craft an original argument about this topic. The project culminates in a lengthy essay and a public presentation and defense of the thesis.

Requirements for the honors option can be found at the bottom of the catalog page for the Philosophy Major.

Maeve Langlie ’26

“Representations of What? Tracking Theories of Intentionality and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism”

Kant (1724-1804) famously argued that the “appearances” of things are distinct from “things in themselves.” Scholars still debate whether this distinction is between two classes of objects or between two classes of properties of objects.

In the meantime, a separate debate in the philosophy of mind asks: what does it mean for a representation to be “about” its object. Philosophers call this aboutness, “intentionality.” Langlie argues, first, that the initial question (about Kant’s metaphysics) should be answered in favor of a one-object reading. This raises the question: what theory of intentionality would best fit with such a metaphysical picture?

Langlie articulates and defends the claim that Kant’s metaphysical view must involve an implicit assumption of a “tracking” theory of intentionality. On her reading, the mind is intentionally directed towards what it “tracks” in the mind-independent environment, and this is true even when the “in itself” nature of mind-independent things bears no resemblance to how we represent them.

Fred Phillips ’26

“Comparative Analysis of Leibniz, Newton and Kant on the Properties of Matter”

Towards the end of the scientific revolution, there was an explosion of theorizing about the nature of our universe’s smallest objects. “Natural philosophers” from the period (they wouldn’t have called themselves “scientists”) debated questions about the existence of simplest atoms, the impenetrability and elasticity of matter, mechanical interaction, phase changes, cohesion, fluidity versus solidity, etc.

This paper surveys the contributions to these debates from three of the major figures from the period: Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Special emphasis is placed on the problem of cohesion: why does matter stay clumped together?

The paper argues that Leibniz’s attempt at a mechanical explanation is unsatisfying, and that Newton’s account of cohesion as formally similar to Newtonian gravity is an improvement. However, Phillips argues that Kant’s “dynamical” account of attraction and repulsion as innate properties of matter marks the furthest conceptual advance of the period.

Makaelan Bond ’24

“A Defense of a Naturalist Conception of Disease”

According to naturalist conceptions of disease, disease is grounded in objective facts about biology. On this view, there is no normative judgment involved in determining whether a particular biological state is a disease. By contrast, constructivist views claim that a biological state is considered a disease only once it has been decided that it is bad for us. And eliminativists argue that the concept of disease should be discarded entirely and should have no place in clinical practice.

Bond’s thesis defends the naturalist conception against both constructivist and eliminativist stances on pragmatic (i.e., clinically oriented) grounds. The paper concludes with a discussion of the clinical implications for a naturalist conception viz-a-viz normative decision making in medical contexts.

Clara McKnight ’20

“A Top-Down Account of the Binding Problem”

The binding problem concerns how the visual system integrates separately processed features such as color, shape and orientation into unified object representations. Contemporary debates divide broadly between bottom-up accounts, which locate binding in low-level neural mechanisms, and top-down accounts, which emphasize higher-order cognitive processes such as attention and memory.

McKnight’s paper reviews theories from both traditions, and argues that top-down theories offer the more compelling framework because they better account for phenomena related to attention and feature-selection.