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Recovering Heraclitus: Neglected Religious, Ethical And Political Themes In The Work Of A Pre-Socratic Thinker, Thomas Joseph Wood

Wayne State University Dissertations

The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus writes in a puzzling, cryptic way which makes his ideas difficult to work out. Many commentators are content to make some broad statements about his place in the development of philosophy as a natural philosopher or metaphysician; statements for which there is ample support.

In this essay, I argue that we can use Heraclitus’ biography and his historical context to recover his ideas about religion, ethics, and politics. I believe that this method reveals a Heraclitus who was grasping for an early sort of political theory and ethics in response to the turbulent period in …

Politics And Pedagogy: Recuperating Rhetoric And Composition's Native Ethical Tradition, Derek Risse

Wayne State University Dissertations

Over the past decade, scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have shown renewed interest in the topic of ethics, prompting what some have described as an ethical turn in the discipline. Spurred by a deep-seated concern for the legacies of humanism, scholars have turned increasingly to extra-disciplinary referents in continental philosophy. This dissertation works to recuperate the discipline’s native ethical tradition via a critical rereading of the often-implicit treatment of ethics in Composition scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s. Returning to this “critical” moment and emphasizing the rich thinking around the question of ethics provides fuller and more disciplinary-specific resources for …

On Beauty And Ethics In Shakespeare And His Contemporaries, Renuka Gusain

Wayne State University Dissertations

Early modern literature abounds in references to beauty. However, in the past few decades, discussions of beauty have been sidelined in part due to the influence of approaches such as cultural materialism and new historicism; as a result, beauty often gets viewed as some kind of ideological mist that distracts us from ethical issues. By taking beauty as seriously as early modern thinkers did, my research underscores the importance of beauty in early modern literary criticism and reassesses the critical relationship between beauty and ethics. My study posits Shakespeare as philosopher of beauty and reinterprets several literary works, thereby challenging …