Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Interpretive Teleology Without Eschatology: A Study Of The Hermeneutic Strategies Of Nietzsche's Genealogical Project, Darin Sean Mcginnis

Dissertations

In contemporary philosophy, there exists a vigorous debate between those thinkers who advocate the need for a truth that exists outside of historical forces and those who hold that all understanding must be historical in its basis. My research is focused on deciphering this problem by providing a description of how understanding and interpretation occur. More specifically, I have proposed a project that explores how the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche can give some insight into this problem of understanding truth. I argue that Nietzsche develops a method of interpretation - a hermeneutics - that focuses on the manner in …

Joy As Attunement And End In The Philosophies Of Martin Heidegger And Henri Bergson, Justin Albert Harrison

Dissertations

Martin Heidegger claims that attunement is one of the primordial ways in which Dasein understands its world. He focuses on anxiety as the fundamental attunement in which Dasein can more authentically uncover its Being. However, it is necessary to ask if anxiety is the only attunement out of which one can most authentically appropriate Being. Heidegger seems to have an unexamined bias in favor of "negative" attunements (anxiety, boredom) and never undertakes an extended analysis of "positive" moods such as joy or happiness. This dissertation is an examination of joy as a fundamental attunement through the works of Henri Bergson …

Corporations As Group Agents / Responsible Collectives In Theory And In Practice, Kathryn Real King

Dissertations

The goals of this dissertation are to examine the existing philosophical literature on group agency and collective responsibility and to demonstrate that this literature fails to sufficiently address the hierarchical organization of corporations, thereby severely limiting the applicability of this literature to real-world business situations. Where references to corporate hierarchy are made in the group agency and collective responsibility literature, they are incidental and descriptive only. This is in contrast to general business literature, business ethics literature, and organizational theory literature, which each highlight the importance of corporate hierarchy from their respective points of view. In this dissertation, the concept …

Humanity In The Balance: The Relationship Between The Moral Law And The Promotion Of The Moral World In Kant's Ethics, John J. Garcia

Dissertations

This dissertation deals with the tension between two seemingly divergent approaches to morality. On the one hand, there are those who take the view that morality concerns itself with the promotion of certain ends. This is a teleological or consequentialist view of ethics. On the other hand, we see thinkers who take the view that rationality or some other criteria provide us certain moral imperatives that may not be violated, regardless of our desire to bring about a particular end. Kant is usually depicted not only as a member of the latter camp, but indeed as the father of this …

The Soul And The Body In Hegel's Anthropology, Nicholas Mowad

Dissertations

I provide a close exegetical reading of Hegel's "anthropology," his doctrine of the human body and soul, located in the first part of the Philosophy of Spirit, volume three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In the course of this exegesis I show how Hegel demonstrates that all of the phenomena there under investigation must be understood as at once corporeal and distinctively human. Accordingly, anthropological phenomena should not be understood as essentially the same in humans as it is in animals, though many commentators allege that they should be. I provide a survey of the secondary literature on …

An Experiential Approach To Kant's Moral Philosophy: A Reply To Dogmatism, Formalism And Rigorism, Chris Mctavish

Dissertations

Many of Kant's commentators and critics interpret his moral philosophy solely in terms of the cognitive dimension of his categorical imperative. Such a predominant manner of reading Kant gives rise to the criticism that his moral philosophy is too far removed from the actual way in which human beings orient themselves as moral persons in the world. In response to this general tendency in Kant interpretation, my dissertation proposes to offer an experiential approach to Kant's ethics. By the expression experiential I mean an approach to Kant's thinking that attends to the living sense in which we experience the phenomena …

Reorientation Through Interruption: On The Relation Of Immanuel Kant's Modes Of Egoism To His Critical Philosophy, Giancarlo Tarantino

Master's Theses

The relationship between Immanuel Kant's anthropology, and his Critical philosophy has proven to be a notoriously difficult problem, both for specifically Kantian scholarship as well as for philosophy in general. This thesis attempts to investigate this relationship by showing the importance of Kant's modes of egoism at work in his three Critiques. In doing so this thesis will highlight the phenomena of interruption, and orientation as playing crucial interpretive roles for parsing out the aforementioned relationship. I will try to show that anthropology and Critique mutually interrupt, and re-orient one another's specific contributions to the major themes of Kant's thinking.

Law And Its Order, Daniele Manni

Master's Theses

Daniele Manni

Loyola University Chicago

LAW AND ITS ORDER: THE PRIORITY OF ETHICS OVER LEGISLATION

IN PLATO'S LAWS.

Despite the fact that the Laws are almost twenty four hundred years old, their reserve of philosophically and politically interesting points is still copious and relevant for the contemporary reader. The present work is an initial attempt to analyze the nature of law as treated in the Laws and to highlight especially the reliance of the legislative sphere on the ethical sphere.

In spite of the many, and often painfully detailed, laws posited by the Athenian in the course of books VIII-XII, …