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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

The Dependent Nature Of Enlightenment And Capitalism: Discourse On How Civilization Needs Capitalism To Curb The Effects Of Enlightenment, Katriel Lee Apr 2024

The Dependent Nature Of Enlightenment And Capitalism: Discourse On How Civilization Needs Capitalism To Curb The Effects Of Enlightenment, Katriel Lee

Student Research Submissions

This paper examines the interplay between the intellectual movements of enlightenment, the economic system of capitalism, and the manifestation of violent racist ideologies like antisemitism and anti-black racism. The core argument is that while the enlightenment ideals of reason, universality, and human dominance over nature inherently set the stage for categorizing and objectifying groups seen as deviating from the desired uniformity, the emergence of extreme racist violence like the Holocaust requires the additional factors of a failing capitalist economy and the rise of totalitarian governments. In the modern American context, racist thought persists in the more covert form of color-blindness. …


Tracing The Dispossession Of The Enslaves Black Woman And A Potential For Resistance., Lila R. O'Conell Jan 2023

Tracing The Dispossession Of The Enslaves Black Woman And A Potential For Resistance., Lila R. O'Conell

Senior Projects Spring 2023

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


The Poorest Country In The World: Critiquing U.S. Culture Through Relational Cultural Theory And The Saints., Molly Neton Jan 2023

The Poorest Country In The World: Critiquing U.S. Culture Through Relational Cultural Theory And The Saints., Molly Neton

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

In this thesis I critique the American socioeconomic system and culture through a multidisciplinary lens. Using the works of philosopher Karl Marx, economist Robin Kimmerer, and forensic psychologist Christopher Williams, I argue that there are three interconnected characteristics of our socioeconomic system that disincentivize us from creating growth-fostering relationships. These characteristics are the encouragement of overconsumption, the prevalence of hyperindividualism, and that people are valued for what they produce, not who they are. To counteract these characteristics, we must fight to create a Culture of Encounter, which is a culture with a radical dedication to seeing, hearing, and loving individual …


A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett May 2022

A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …


The Moral Agency Of The State: What Does A Virtuous State Look Like And Is Allowing Capitalism Virtuous?, Austin Cable May 2020

The Moral Agency Of The State: What Does A Virtuous State Look Like And Is Allowing Capitalism Virtuous?, Austin Cable

Undergraduate Honors Theses

It has become quite noticeable that modern world politics across the globe has lacked a guiding morality in which we can hold states morally accountable in both the international and domestic spheres. This can be seen in the never-ending wars and occupations across the Middle East, South-East Asia, and many other places around the world. Now, attempting to implement such guiding moral principles seems to be an impossible task mainly because of the massive difficulties that one would face in trying to get the 195 countries around the world to agree on such principles. Because of this, most will probably …


Love, The Other And The City: Critical Analysis Of The Ethics Of Alterity In A Capitalist Society, Juan Luis Cabrera Jan 2020

Love, The Other And The City: Critical Analysis Of The Ethics Of Alterity In A Capitalist Society, Juan Luis Cabrera

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Loving for Levinas is a desubjectivation. The one who loves is the one who does not resist the call of the Other. He who loves, according to Levinas, recognizes in the face of the migrant, the orphan, the widow, and the poor, as an inescapable responsibility. However, is this desubjectivation a possibility in capitalist cities? Capitalism is the consequence of a philosophical heritage founded in the totality of the same. Philosophy understood as “love of wisdom” places man in a position of control towards everything that surrounds him, the Other included. Everything belongs to the subject that knows the reality …


Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller Sep 2019

Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores multiple ways philanthropy builds and undermines the common world. Political science treatments of philanthropy have focused mainly on its role in the development of civil society, with a recent turn towards critiques of philanthropy as an instrument of elite power and tension between private wealth and democratic governance. In this dissertation, I examine how philanthropy can foster enduring spaces of human flourishing, or reduce beneficiaries to objects of pity, surveillance and domination. I trace philanthropy's evolution from ancient to contemporary contexts and propose a framework for philanthropy to, under certain conditions, build and care for the common …


An Ecological Critique Of Capitalism, Macauley Berg May 2016

An Ecological Critique Of Capitalism, Macauley Berg

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I will be addressing the broad set of impacts generally referred to as "the environmental crisis.” I argue that this environmental crisis is truly an ecological one, insofar as humans are its primary drivers as well as its primary victims. I then investigate the structural cause (or structural causes) which produce this multitude of effects. In turn, this leads me to seek out and address the social underpinnings of this problem. I identify capitalism (specifically, its current form of global neoliberal economics) as a major driver of the ecological crisis and explore the relationship between capitalism and environmental practice. As …