CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | da Cunha Cavalcanti Silva, Renan |
|---|---|
| Title | The Philosophy of Feasibility |
| Summary | What is it for an outcome to be feasible or infeasible? Some states of affairs, such as world peace, seem to be clearly infeasible, at least in the foreseeable future, while others seem to be evidently feasible, such as my doing my laundry today. Once one moves away from obvious cases like these, things start to get tricky and we need an account of what makes outcomes feasible or not. In this dissertation, I argue that feasibility can be reduced to the agents that exist and the abilities that they have. There is no property of feasibility that exists in its own right – that is, there is nothing extra out there in the world that exists over and above properties such as agency, ability, possibility, likelihood and so on. If one believes in the principle of ontological parsimony, which holds that one should not postulate the existence of more entities than is required, then one should not be committed to a property of feasibility. Based on this finding, I then turn my attention to the nature of agency and abilities. First, I examine one important argument for claiming that organizations (states, firms, political parties, etc.) can be agents and reject it. Then I try to provide an account of one particular kind of ability – state capacity, which has played a significant role in contemporary empirical social science. |
| Supervisor | Huoranszki, Ferenc |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/da-cunha_renan.pdf |
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