Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Poetics Of Finitude: Time And Death In The Poetry Of R.M. Rilke And T.S. Eliot, Isabel James Greene

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Selfish, Jacopo Mavica

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Balancing On The Edges: The Phenomenological Children Of Children's Literature, Zoe Stone

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature and The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Auf Die Schiffe!, Koben Morgenthaler

Senior Projects Fall 2023

I argue that metaphors of water and fluidity are essential to both the content and form of Nietzsche’s work. In regards to the content, many important ideas such as a healthy response to the death of God and a philosophy of the future are, at their core, characterized by embracing fluidity. As for the form, just as Zarathustra tells us his teachings have become a river, Nietzsche’s work uses metaphor, aphorism, and poetic language to embody the qualities of dancing water. Consequently, it defies rigid interpretations that would turn it into a system and avoids falling prey to its own …

How Aesthetics Shape Our Ethics: Exploring Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, And Digital World, Nika Kokhodze

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Every day, we encounter numerous amount of images, films, news and propaganda. The different forms and manifestations of aesthetics haunts our lives daily. What if I told you that Aesthetics has immense amount of power? This project aims specifically at that as it explores authoritarian states and the liberal democracies alike. How could the moral compass that we all cherish and hold dearly be predicated and shaped by something so remote as aesthetics? Exploring through examples from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the digital world we all live in, one might find some answers and the right questions to …

Dimentia: Footnotes Of Time, Zachary Hait

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Time from the physicist's perspective is not inclusive of our lived experience of time; time from the philosopher's perspective is not mathematically engaged, in fact Henri Bergson asserted explicitly that time could not be mathematically engaged whatsoever. What follows is a mathematical engagement of time that is inclusive of our lived experiences, requiring the tools of storytelling.

Poetic Becoming: Building With Heidegger, Isabella Menuez Santana

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Orientation Of The Soul, Caleb M A Short

Senior Projects Spring 2020

an ontology and phenomenology of the meaning mechanism

in search of the life best lived and the capacity of human agency

Nietzsche And Expressionism: The Neue Mensch In Kafka, Kaiser, And Strauss, Marion Stoll Adams

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Nietzsche's Übermensch and the Expressionist Neue Mensch are two difficult, cryptic, and contradictory ideas. This project compares the Neue Mensch to the Übermensch through the process of transformation, in hopes of better understanding both concepts. The following chapters are an analysis of Franz Kafka’s short story “Das Urteil”, Georg Kaiser’s play Von morgens bis mitternachts, and Richard Strauss’ opera Salome. Through a side-by-side reading of Expressionist literature and Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, we can see how the Expressionists expanded upon, and experimented with, the concept of the Übermensch.

What's The Problem With Noumenal Affection?, Leonardo Mugi Santoso

Senior Projects Spring 2018

According to transcendental idealism, our experience of the empirical world is the result of our minds being causally affected by supersensible things in themselves; however, transcendental idealism also holds that things in themselves are unknowable by us. The seeming incompatibility of these two claims is known as legendary 'problem of noumenal affection.' This problem has led many scholars to conclude that Kant's theory is inconsistent. In this project I offer a new diagnosis of the problem by reexamining the supposedly incompatible components: The doctrines of noumenal affection and noumenal ignorance. I argue that there are philosophical and textual worries surrounding …

The Objectivity Of Subjectivity: The Dialectics Of Marx, Lenin, And Brecht, Timothy Wells

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Everyone And No One: Freedom, Politics And God In Hegel's Philosophy Of Freedom, Samuel J. Copeland

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This senior project is an exploration of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy of freedom. It draws primarily on Hegel's texts The Phenomenology of Spirit, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, and Lectures on the Philosophy of History. The exploration of Hegel's concept of freedom brings in an analysis of Hegel's Lordship and Bondage Dialectic, his critique of Kantian morality, his philosophy of the State and his philosophy of Religion and God.

Being And Itself, Chi Fung Lok

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Wonder, Aesthetics, And Ethics: A Meditation On Technological Thinking, Psychical Distance, And The Moral Imagination, Callen Beck Gordon

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Death, Love Duty: A Therepeutic Triptych - Written By Mouna Krupardini, Mouna Krupardini

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

An Outsider's Perspective: Walter Benjamin's Vision Of Philosophy, Bethany Alden Zulick

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Intention In The World Of The Apparatus, João Otávio Rosa

Senior Projects Spring 2016

My aim is to describe how the technical image, which is at the very core of our culture today, is in fact a technologically aided method of thinking (or imagining) which has outstripped our powers to control it and as a result come to absolutely dominate our lives. Further, through this domination, the technical image has created a type of visual culture that has ensnared us silently. Not only are we, in essence, “non-existing” if we refuse to participate in this global image network but the network and computational visual culture has evolved and become complex to the point we …

Beginning In Heidegger, Nietzsche, And Mallarmé, Austen H. Hinkley

Senior Projects Spring 2016

This project is focused on the theme of beginning. The first chapter is a reading of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time as an attempt at beginning a new ontology that understands itself as a construct that must be, to quote Heidegger, “critical against itself.” The second chapter is a reading of three of Nietzsche's metaphors as a way of both examining and enacting a beginning. The third chapter is concerned with Mallarmé’s revolution of poetic form in Un coup de Dés, which enacts a new beginning on which the poem reflects through its images and form. Through an understanding of …

Stanza My Stone: On The Death Of God And The Nature Of Poetry, Ariella Joann Kust

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Reduction Ad Absurdum (Or About Freedom), David Leonard Mamukelashvili

Senior Projects Fall 2016

If I asked you what was your favorite book? Who was your favorite actor? Or which candy did you like the most? You would answer; furthermore support your response with reason. That reason would be the philosophical aspect of your response. However, even if I, also with reason, refuted your argument, there’d still be this spark of ‘just because’ in you, and that is what I want to dedicate my project to – that little sparkle of ‘just because’ – little inner faith, belief, and ambiguous attraction that we have towards things.

Philosophy asks for practice. It is something that …

Yearning For The Unhistorical: Nietzsche On Triumph And Coronation, Travis Brock Kennedy

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Heidegger's Attentiveness To Language: A Question Of Translation And "Original Contents", Alexander M. Moore

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

No One Man Should Have All That Power: Rhetoric And Its Reception In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Philip Adam Torphy

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Siddhartha's Smile: Schopenhauer, Hesse, Nietzsche, Benjamin Dillon Schluter

Senior Projects Fall 2015

In this project, I argue that Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha can be read as an attempted reconciliation the antithetical worldviews of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. The first two chapters show that the figures of Gotama and Siddhartha represent Schopenhauerian and Nietzschean worldviews, respectively. The third chapter analyzes the smile as a symbol used to reconcile Siddhartha and Gotama. In the fourth and final chapter, I investigate Hesse’s development of symbol of the smile in relation to his engagement with Chinese philosophy, specifically Taoism, a tradition of thought based on the ultimate reconciliation of apparent opposites.

The World Through Your Eyes: An Analysis Of Spike Jonze's Her, Thatcher Kupple Snyder

Senior Projects Fall 2015

The skeptical concerns of Spike Jonze's Her mirror those of Stanley Cavell's, representing a cinematic adaptation of his therapeutic analysis of philosophical skepticism. Her addresses the loneliness of the skeptic, and demonstrates a way by which one can pacify, or better understand, the skeptical impulse.

The Masks Of Heidegger: National Socialism And Anti-Semitism, Julia Lauren Haerr

Senior Projects Fall 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Forsake Your Moneymaker: Defining And Defending The True Value Of Music, Preston Rw Ossman

Senior Projects Spring 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Philosopher's Diagnosis: Sickness In Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, And Heidegger, Anna Menaker Daniszewski

Senior Projects Fall 2014

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.