Kathryn Fraser Mackay University Fellows

During my Summer Research Fellowship, I conducted an independent philosophical research project examining contemporary theories of evil. My work began with a close reading of Claudia Card's The Atrocity Paradigm, which served as the primary focus of my research, alongside works by Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

This project focused on the distinction between moral and intellectual virtues, traits which, respectively, make a person morally good (kindness) or intellectually good (logicality). In it, I researched and worked to set out the structure of a paper arguing that there is good reason to believe that a distinction cannot succeed philosophically, which will be continued as an SYE in the 2025-2026 academic year. 

My research explored different therapeutic models of addiction from a philosophy lens, evaluating the role agency and self-identity play in addiction. Using the widely known 12-step model, this paper discusses the moral model, genetic model, brain disease model, and existential model of addiction. Ultimately, I conclude that addiction needs to be approached from a more individualistic model that acknowledges the variety of factors that play a role in the disorder.

It is common to ask what something means, or what someone means by something, but rare to ask what it means for something to mean something. What does ‘meaning’ mean? This is arguably the most fundamental question a human enquirer can ask, and it is quite difficult to answer. The prevailing view in the philosophy of language is that a sentence's meaning is defined by its truth-conditions, or the conditions under which it would be true.

I propose that the practice of chemistry often reduces its subject matter into a vacuous form of itself; that we erroneously equate truth values assigned to states of matter with forms so mitigated or changed that they are no longer ontologically dependent on—nor can they feasibly describe—the original substance in question. During this fellowship, I examined objects in general and how their identities and demands on existence affect the types of ontological commitments we can justifiably devote ourselves to.