Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Equipmentality As A Pharmakon, Sherif Khalil

Theses and Dissertations

One must lose the world to know himself, if in his attempt to know the world he lost himself.

In this thesis, I argue that equipment is a pharmakon in that its harm lies in the service it is supposed to provide. Through equipment one gets to have a practical sense of the world. But, the world in this sense is a world for everyone and for no one in particular, that is, it is made to the measure of the average person who has no aspirations to realize his authenticity. That is how equipment helps us practically make sense …

Mythos And Meaning: Medieval Appropriations Of Mythological Types In The Consolation Of Philosophy And Later Western Literatures, Francis J. Hunter

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Often referred to as the last Roman and first medieval, Boethius, author of The Consolation of Philosophy, has been widely received as an unoriginal philosopher who sought to preserve Platonic thought as the Western Roman Empire fell. However, this essay features an investigation into the literary originality of Boethius who initiates a line of Christian and Platonic literatures to follow in the medieval European tradition. Boethius demonstrates himself to be a poet who makes great use of philosophy rather than as a philosopher writing poetry. Boethius’ poetic influence is felt most strongly in major aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy and …

Social Theory From The Second Person Perspective, Connor Cosgrove

Major Papers

This paper relies on the work of Charles Taylor, Rahel Jaeggi, and Harmut Rosa to develop a method of ‘second-person critique.’ This is developed in opposition to first-person critique, otherwise known as self criticism, and third-person critique, which I take to be representative of instrumental reason. I criticize instrumental reason from Taylor’s perspective, while also relying on Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber to do the same. To further develop Rosa’s theory of resonance, I rely on David Graeber. I conclude by suggesting that while phenomenology has long accounted for our embodied relationship to the world, a ‘resonant phenomenology’ that includes …

Humanity Amid Innovation: Exploring Our Relationship To Technology, Sarah Durkee

Senior Theses and Projects

This thesis examines the impacts of technology on fundamental aspects of human nature and experience. Drawing on the works from Kant, Turing, Arendt, Benjamin, and Freud, it explores how rapid technological change is redefining human reason, intelligence, and creativity in the digital age. The first chapter analyzes whether modern online communication platforms realize or undermine Kant's vision of an enlightened public sphere fostering free discourse and critique. It argues that prioritizing engagement over substantive debate, these digital realms corrode the depth of interaction essential for cultivating human reason. The second chapter explores the pursuit of artificial intelligence as a reproduction …

Cinema's Poetic Function: Creating An Amorous Distance, William Yonts

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The aim of this thesis is to examine how cinema can embrace its poetic function to avoid its assimilation into preexisting hermeneutic structures, which would leave it vulnerable to myth as defined by Roland Barthes, and instead be a generative force, encouraging its viewer to engage with the full potential of the text. This mode of spectatorship is termed the “amorous distance,” which Barthes describes as his simultaneous fascination with the film and that which exceeds it. The amorous distance finds further articulation through the work of Roman Jakobson and Julia Kristeva. Jakobson’s schema of six language functions describes the …

Embracing The Wound Of Contingency: Transcribing Reality In Supernatural Horror And Found Footage, Mason Dax Dickerson

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

To counter both the form of critical thought first outlined by Kant that dispels absolute knowledge, as well as the dogmatic necessitarianism that asserts the universe must be one way for an absolute originary reason, Quentin Meillassoux argues for the “non-facticity of facticity” to implicate an absolute contingency or unreason structuring reality: in effect, anything could happen for no reason at all. Meillassoux suggests the trauma of the contingent event and the sudden impossibility of inductive science in its wake may be explored in an “Extro-Science Fiction” text (XSF) – but limits his examples to science fiction literature. Framing the …

The Drivers Of Academic Novelty In Digital Capitalism: Job Insecurity, Mental Illness And Time Poverty, Adalberto Fernandes

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

The present-day digital capitalist academy increases novel academic results by leveraging factors such as precarious academic employment, time poverty, and mental illness. This paradigm reveals a confluence that turns seemingly negative aspects into productive elements. The consequence of this hypothesis is that by enhancing work, time and mental health conditions, there may be a reduction in the number of novelties, with an enhancement of academic's role as producers of truth.

The Bengali Oil-Eaters: A Speculative Approach To New Materialism And The Nonhuman In Contemporary Petrofiction, Jenna Wayland

Honors Projects

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter …

Spiritual Cinema: Agel, Merleau-Ponty And The Cinematic Real, Patrick O'Connor Dr

Journal of Religion & Film

This article seeks to retrieve the work of Henri Agel, and his collaborator Amédée Ayfre, for our theoretical understanding of film-philosophy. I explore their distinctive contribution to thinking philosophically about film and assess the relative merits of their work for the phenomenology of film. While exceptionally valuable for religious and theological interpretations of film I proceed to argue that Agel and Ayfre’s work needs to be supplemented with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s film-phenomenology to adequately express the temporal and motional nature of film. Merleau-Ponty’s work I contend while exceptionally valuable is brief and underdeveloped, and therefore does not fully …

Alyosha The Christian Hermeneut, Eddie Li

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

Presentation Abstract: Alyosha as the Christian Hermeneut

This presentation is adapted from my essay Alyosha as the Christian Hermeneut, written under the supervision of Dr. Paul Contino. In the essay, I gave an analysis of the character Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and Dr. Contino’s book on Incarnational Realism. I discussed how Alyosha adapts from an inexperienced Christian disciple to a mature interpreter capable of conducting the hermeneutical fusion of horizons with different horizons. Within this capability, Alyosha develops his unique Christian horizon, enabling him to understand and reconcile the …

The Only Labourer Left: Resituating The Nonhuman Animal In The Language Of Labour And The History Of Philosophy, Mina Rosefield

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is an investigation of the ontological position of the nonhuman animal within the Marxist tradition and as it concerns both the language of value production and the slaughterhouse. The premise of my study is an engagement with Marx’s oeuvre and influences, as well those who respond to his work. Within this context, I propose that the nonhuman animal’s ontological position—as it concerns labour, language, and intellect—is subject to a gesture of erasure which marks their being as performing the action of interest in the absence of the possibility to claim either determination, or fluency of capability. This paradoxical …

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

The True And Only Technic: Technological Ubiquity And Its Critics, Heretics, And Zealots, Hampton A. Dodd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against technological ubiquity, the philosopher, the ecologist, the theologian, the psychologist, the radical, the reactionary, and the poet have each responded. This analysis seeks to explicate the nature of such responses, as well as to explore their contemporary form and elucidate what those presently publishing might offer as programs toward the future. In order to do this, what follows is broken up into a series of sections, each focused on what I have perceived to be the foremost themes present throughout technological critique: becoming, freedom, identity, faith, space, time, and progress. Prior to such thematic excavations, this analysis offers a …

The Hand Of Thought: A Cross-Tradition Examination Of Kosho Uchiyama And Martin Heidegger, Gregory Burgin

Comparative Philosophy

This paper presents how the Sōtō Zen priest, Kōshō Uchiyama, and the mercurial and polarizing German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, approach what the former calls “opening the hand of thought” (omoi no te banashi). For Uchiyama, the metaphoric opening of our mental hand requires the meditative practice of zazen or “just sitting” (shikantaza) and is said to mean that we avoid the act of thinking. Conversely, Heidegger maintains that the “releasement” (Gelassenheit) of our conceptual grasp is the basis of a more essential and “meditative” mode of thinking and discourse (besinnliches Denken). While Uchiyama and Heidegger appear to be at odds, …

Earth Art In The Great Acceleration: Times/Counter-Times, Monuments/Counter-Monuments, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This article attempts to situate land art in the deserts of the US Southwest in terms of the works’ relation to and rupture with more traditional genres (seventeenth to twentieth centuries) of parks, gardens, and landscape architecture. It argues that the earlier works provide implicit answers to questions concerning Earth’s meaning and offer models of flourishing habitation. In contrast, the more recent works, all constructed in the era of the great acceleration (the Anthropocene), pose questions having to do with new challenges posed by climate change and the devastation of the Earth.

Unveiling The Unseen: A Feminist Exploration Of Consciousness And Empowerment Among Homeless Women Through Consciousness-Raising, Scarlett Liu

CMC Senior Theses

Homeless women have been forgotten subject matter in the study and practice of feminist consciousness and consciousness-raising efforts. However, they grapple with the compounded challenges of both gender and homelessness within an oppressive societal structure. This thesis therefore seeks to conceptualize the consciousness of women, and particularly homeless women, in a feminist lens. Specifically, this thesis explores the Othering of women’s consciousness through the intellectual lineage of Simone de Beauvoir and Hegel, and emphasizes the role of material circumstances in shaping consciousness-raising efforts. Then, this thesis examines two unique struggles faced by homeless women – survival sex and homeless motherhood. …

Recognition And Domination: A Hegelian Approach To Evolving Gender And Technology Paradigms, Zachary Davis

CMC Senior Theses

This paper aims to develop a strong account of recognition. It begins with a Hegel-inspired account of recognition as a fundamental desire that drives humanity. This account establishes recognition as fundamental to the initial subject formation of independent self-consciousnesses as agents. I offer the lord-bondsman dualism to provide a critique of domination as oppositional to securing the means for recognition. This entails that, as history progresses the world ought to move towards universally adopting mutual recognition relationships without domination. I adopt this goal as an ideal form of recognition. In Chapter 2, I apply this recognitional framework to gender. Through …

Negative Psychology Of Anti-Semitism: Fear Of The Uncategorizable, Benjamin Strosberg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Anti-Semitism is a pervasive global issue, particularly prominent in the United States. Studying and defining anti-Semitism prove remarkably challenging for scholars, leading to inadequate understanding and exclusion from contemporary academic discourse and social justice initiatives. In this dissertation, I made the case that anti-Semitism is hard to categorize, stemming, in part, from the difficulty in categorizing what it is to be Jewish, which seems to be multi-form (a figure of thought, a race, an ethnicity, a religion, a nation, none of the above). In thinking about the difficulty in categorization, I constellated various instances of anti-Jewish practices across historical epochs …

Giving Death To The Production Of Knowledge: Collective Resistance Through Testimony, Mitch De Lange

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis describes the structures an institution, specifically the university, deploys to absorb testimonies of violence in order to strengthen its existing policies, norms, and operations. I consider testimonies by survivors of sexual violence, who demand the end of the current order of the university and its existing policies. Some of these structures are symbolic exchange, the production of knowledge, the logic of repression and liberation, and the work of mourning. I suggest these discursive structures protect the existing boundaries of universities while lending them the authority to speak on behalf of survivors. Therefore, rather than engage in an archeology …

The Basic Dualism In The World, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” This paper supports Harman’s assertion from a systems theoretic perspective and illustrates it with some examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. But dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components not only imply one another but are related, and where this spatial dyad is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or an additional orthogonal dyad.

Bloody Rationality: The Dialectic Of Modern Reason And Sacrifice In Hegel, Adorno, And Horkheimer, Cara S. Greene

Philosophy ETDs

In my dissertation, I argue that Hegel, Adorno, and Horkheimer develop theories of modern sacrifice grounded in their critiques of modern reason—what Hegel calls “the Understanding” and Adorno and Horkheimer call “instrumental reason.” I contend that these thinkers recognize the process of rational cognition, which abstracts conceptual data from empirical reality and establishes the dominance of the universal over particular phenomena, as a sacrificial process—a view supported by their routine description of this process using the language of violence and death. However, this sacrificial conception of modern reason isn’t metaphorical: when read alongside their analyses of discursive cunning, an instrumental …

The Embodied Rhetoric Of Cognitive Labour, Shubhayan Chakrabarti

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation traces the roots of neoliberal selfhood to the rationalist ontology of modernity in the 1600s. The historical tension between materialism and immaterialism is expressed in the historicisation of work into Fordism and post-Fordism where embodied factory toil is apparently replaced by immaterial work, recalling Descartes’ mind-body split. If post-Fordist work addresses the Marxist critique of alienation in its emphasis on entrepreneurial inner selves, it does not explain the post-Fordist preoccupation to efficiently “Taylorise” the body through obsessive productivity. I argue that the factory prevails in the entrepreneur’s adoption of factory efficiency as a learnt behaviour from the Fordist …

Algorithmic Hypnosis, Suarjan Prasai

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is about futures which are inscribed in the present. It is about the past determining the future and the future determining the present. It is also about artificial intelligence, algorithmic learning and the politics of mediums as they curate our sense of time. Today’s landscape is curated by algorithmic machines that are quickly taking over all aspects of social relations. Looking at media-theorist Wendy H.K. Chun’s analysis of homophily (i.e., love of sameness; commonality), I observe the regionality of standard critiques of capital and feel out new modes of resistance which do away with the discourse of the …

The Gaze And The Other On Social Media: Reexamining Existence As Human Beings In The Digital Age, Yuki Yokoi

Philosophy Honors Projects

Social media is now a prevailing tool for people and we often interact with other people on social media. Human interaction takes place both in face-to-face settings and on social media and becoming so-called influencers is a dream among teenagers. However, using social media necessarily entails exposure to the other people and social media companies. Then, is using social media existentially beneficial? I explore this question by employing arguments from Erving Goffman, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Guy Debord to explicate the existential issues which social media entails. From Sartre and Debord’s perspectives, we are inevitably objectified by the gaze when using …

The Forgetting Of Fire: An Archaeology Of Technics, Thomas A. Doerksen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation applies the methods of Bachelard and Foucault to key moments in the development of science. By analyzing the attitudes of four figures from four different centuries, it shows how epistemic attitudes have shifted from a participation in non-human, natural realities to a construction of human-centred technologies. The idea of an epistemic attitude is situated in reference to Foucault’s concept of the episteme and his method of archaeology; an attitude is the institutionally-situated and personally-enacted comportment of an epistemic agent toward an object of knowledge. This line of thought is pursued under the theme of elemental fire, which begins …

Hypo-Cathexis And Impotence In The Facilitating Environment Of The Anthropocene: Towards Digital Humanities, Brian W. Millen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an attempt to understand why there does not seem to be enough will to take proper action in light of the information we have about the destructive effects of the Anthropocene, in particular: climate change and the destruction of biodiversity. It is an attempt to follow the injunctions of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler to re-examine and re-evaluate knowledge in terms of the primary role of technics in human experience, and to preliminarily situate the digital humanities within such a project. In this paper, I investigate Sigmund Freud's concepts of cathexis, decathexis, and hyper-cathexis as psychic mechanisms whereby …

Witnessing Conspiracy Theories: Developing An Intersectional Approach To Conspiracy Theory Research, David Guignion

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation proposes an intersectional approach to conspiracy theory research that engages conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists by considering their proximity and affiliations with hegemonic power structures. Against challenges to conspiracy theories based on their lack of empirical legitimacy (Rosenblum and Muirhead 2019) and building on arguments that propound their status as “subjugated knowledges” (Bratich 2008), this dissertation argues that conspiracy theories can be vectors of anti-oppressive resistance against systemic forces that disenfranchise racial, gender, and class minorities. Conspiracy theories are not a homogenous phenomenon; they are particular instances of potentially generative suspicion against powerful forces. The dissertation deploys Kelly …

The Cave And The Stars: On The People And Democracy Of Non-Philosophy, Jeremy R. Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This monograph dissertation explores the work of François Laruelle and the democratic nature of his non-philosophy. In four separate chapters, this dissertation argues for identifying non-philosophy as the introduction of democracy into thought and seeks to instantiate a necessary theoretical delimitation for its programme, which explores the relationships between people, thought, and power. Chapter One analyzes previous philosophical frameworks from thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Max Horkheimer, and Louis Althusser on their respective stances toward philosophy’s role for people. Chapter Two investigates the work of François Laruelle for the past fifty years as the development of non-philosophy or “human philosophy.” …

The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …

The Psychedelic Dasein: Modelling The Effects Of Psilocybin With Heidegger’S Phenomenology, Eamon Robert Stuart Macdougall

Major Papers

This paper argues that the mystical experience induced by psilocybin (understood through the tradition of Heideggerian phenomenology) modulates the attuned understanding of oneself, the world, and how the individual relates to the world. This kind of particular experience is not accessible to the individual through ordinary consciousness, therefore psilocybin may give us access to a new kind of understanding. This understanding may offer a solution to the empirical deficiencies surrounding the short-term and long-term effects of psilocybin, such as how a meagre two to three high doses have yielded unprecedented results in the treatment of tobacco addiction, and in the …