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Philosophy

University at Albany, State University of New York

Theses/Dissertations

American

Publication Year

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The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom Jan 2016

The Enlightenment And The Origins Of Racism, Peter Andrew Schrom

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The Enlightenment has been thought of as the Age of Reason: the birth of the individual, the rise of print culture, the beginning of the middle class, and an exponential growth in the sciences. The Enlightenment shaped the world into the form that it is today, but it also marks the start of colonization and the slave trade. The following thesis seeks to demonstrate the importance of the Enlightenment to both colonization and the slave trade; that without it neither of these practices would have had the reach that they achieved over time. Using the works of Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques …


A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik Jan 2009

A Natural History Of The Mind : Edwards, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Michael Edmund Jonik

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers drew on European natural science and philosophy - specifically in terms of concepts of form, perception, and experience - to open new possibilities for thinking the relationship between the mind and the physical world. In each of the moments of American intellectual history here considered - the natural theology of Calvinism, the idealistic natural history of Transcendentalism, and the movement towards an evolutionary process-philosophy of Pragmatism - "place" becomes not only geographical location, but a dynamic field of interactions of natural historical, literary, theological, and philosophical knowledge. I trace this through …