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Apology And Reconciliation In Settler States, Nicholas B. Murphy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation offers a normative account of how we should conceive of reconciliation between Indigenous people(s), states qua states, and their non-Indigenous citizens. It mines pre-theoretic understandings of reconciliation to determine appropriate governing norms for reconciled relationships, the normative expectations that attend these, and what processes or initiatives might be necessary to achieve them. In liberal democratic settler states like Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand the desirability of reconciliation is acknowledged by all parties. However, considerable ambiguity surrounds the concept ‘reconciliation.’ This is problematic because concepts influence social discourse, and the rhetoric of reconciliation not only guides …

Aristotle's Account Of Time: A Moderate Realism, Pierre-Luc Boudreault

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation proposes an interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of time as a whole from a study of Physics IV. 10-14. It addresses interpretive issues and objections pertaining to Aristotle’s view about the nature of time, its existence, as well as its unity and universality. In response to these problems, the interpretation of some ancient and medieval commentators – Themistius, Simplicius, Philoponus, Albert the Great and in particular, Thomas Aquinas – is by and large defended against recent interpretations. It is argued that by defining time as “the number of movement with respect to the “before” and “after” (Phys. IV. …

An Archaeology Of Contemporary Speculative Knowledge, Justas Patkauskas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates contemporary speculative knowledge grounded in the immanence episteme, which is struggling to emerge as a foundation for a new kind of absolute knowledge. Regarding method, I use Michel Foucault’s concept of archaeology, situating archaeology in the context of deconstruction. In general, by delineating the various differences and genealogies within immanence theory, I show that immanence is neither a monolithic homogeneity nor a schizophrenic multiplicity but a coherent, if troubled, ground for speculative thought.

In Chapter 1, I define deconstruction as a broad philosophical project concerned with the order of knowledge and the University and its disciplines. I …

Toward A Fluid Cinematic Spectatorship And Desire: Revisiting Laura Mulvey’S Psychoanalytic Film Theories, Taylor Ashton Mcgoey

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis project re-evaluates Laura Mulvey’s film theories regarding psychoanalysis and the “male gaze,” first found in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). By re-evaluating the limitations of Mulvey’s use of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic model this project seeks to understand the desires and processes of identification of cinematic spectators who reject the ideological imperative of the “male gaze”. As many critics have noted, Mulvey’s initial examination of cinema does not account for LGBTQ+ spectators and/or black spectators who occupy looking relations that reject cis-normative and heteronormative white Hollywood cinematic conventions. From this standpoint, we begin the …

"Second Sight": Acknowledging W.E.B. Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" As A Step Towards Dissolution, Alexandra M. Hudecki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project examines American scholar W.E.B.’s DuBois’ idea of “double consciousness”, from his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The idea of “double consciousness” has and continues to be utilized by Black scholars and artists in literary, theoretical, and psychological contexts, some of which I hope my paper will adequately survey. I begin by examining “double consciousness” from the perspective of particulars by understanding Du Bois’s original idea and the specificities of the American context he himself was a part, considering the legacy of slavery. Then, by focusing primarily on writers such as Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright and Paul …

Marin Mersenne And Pierre Gassendi As Descartes’ Questioners, Alejandra Velázquez Zaragoza, Leonel Toledo Marín

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

In the following pages, we will explore the proximity of Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi’s arguments against Descartes’ "Meditations." We will study how, in some of their objections, both Mersenne and Gassendi adopted a nominalist and an empiricist view regarding central topics in Cartesian epistemology, such as the idea of God, and the origin and classification of ideas in the mind. We propose that the assessment of the confrontation between the two objectors and Descartes may provide us a better picture of the complex intellectual debates that took place at the very beginnings of modern philosophy.

Dreams And Ideas: Baxter On Berkeley, Melissa Frankel

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In this paper I look at a particular narrative, famously articulated by Reid, that holds that Descartes’s ‘Way of Ideas’ leads inevitably to Berkeley’s immaterialism. In the service of examining this narrative more closely, I consider Andrew Baxter’s early 18^th century criticisms of Berkeley, and especially Baxter’s view that immaterialism begins with a dream hypothesis and is therefore self-undermining. I suggest that a careful consideration of Baxter’s criticism(s) is illuminating in a number of ways: in so far as it anticipates future criticisms of and engagements with Berkeleyan immaterialism, in so far as it helps to reveal the actual …

Lunch Break!, Bon Appetit

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

No abstract provided.

Are Animal Machines? Gómez Pereira And Descartes On Animal Minds, Enrique Chávez-Arvizo

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

Forty two years before Descartes’ birth, in his Antoniana Margarita (Medina del Campo, 1554), Spanish physician and philosopher Gómez Pereira explicitly argues the following assertions:

(1) Animals lack reason

(2) Animals lack understanding

(3) Animals do not think

(4) Animals cannot feel (Bruta non sentire)

(5) Animals cannot see as we do

(6) Animals are machines

(7) Animals have no rational soul

(8) Animals have no indivisible soul

(9) Animals have no language

The above claims on animal automatism are commonly thought to have originated with Descartes. In this paper I will expound Gómez Pereira’s arguments, contra the School and …

Kant, Cicero, And The Stoic Doctrine Of The Highest Good, Corey Dyck

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

In this presentation I consider the context for Kant's discussion of the highest good in the Dialectic of the second Critique. I begin by showing how his original account of the highest good in the Canon of the first Critique addresses deficiencies in ancient accounts, particularly in the Stoic identification of virtue and happiness. I then consider the defense of the Stoic conception in Christian Garve's influential translation and commentary on Cicero's De officiis in 1783. It is, I contend, this account, which engages with Kant's discussion in the Canon at a number of junctures, that spurs Kant's decision …

Introduction, Benjamin Hill, Alberto Luis López

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No abstract provided.

On The Ancient Roots Of Berkeley Immaterialist Idealism, Alberto Luis López

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

No abstract provided.

It's Alive: Margaret Cavendish On Matter, Order, And God, Marleen Rozemond

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

Margaret Cavendish is widely regarded as a vitalist: she considers all matter as alive, including an endowment with mental capacities, and rejects dualism. She rejects two important motives for dualism in the period. She agrees with her Cambridge Platonist contemporaries, More and Cudworth (and many others) that the order in nature ultimately comes from God’s plans. But she rejects their view that matter can’t execute God’s commands and that their execution requires immaterial entities. For Cavendish matter is shot through with rationality and the power to implement plans. This conception of matter comes with an utter rejection of the other …

Descartes And Our Philosophies, Juan Carlos Moreno Romo

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We propose to show that, although we think of Descartes as a "modern Parmenides" or as the "father of Modernity", otherwise for excellent reasons, this condition is at least as ambiguous as different are the cultures or societies that arose from the breakdown of Christianity. Where the Protestant Reformation triumphed, the dominant conception of philosophy is manifestly anticartesian, although they recognize, curiously, a debt to Cartesian philosophy; for example, we recognize this due in Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Neither empiricist nor rationalist, neither analytical nor continental, nor national or identitarian either, more than a "French", "European" or "Western" philosopher, Descartes would …

Leibniz’S Analysis Of Change: Vague States, Physical Continuity, And The Calculus, Richard Arthur

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One of the most puzzling features of Leibniz’s deep metaphysics is the apparent contradiction between his claims (1) that the law of continuity holds everywhere, so that in particular, change is continuous in every monad, and (2) that “changes are not really continuous,” since successive states contradict one another. In this paper I try to show in what sense these claims can be understood as compatible. My analysis depends crucially on Leibniz’s idea that enduring states are “vague,” and abstract away from further changes occurring within them at a higher resolution—consistently with his famous doctrine of "petites perceptions." As Leibniz …

Spinoza On Language, Luis Ramos-Alarcón

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Some scholars have understood that Spinoza’s extreme rationalism, nominalism, conventionalism, and rejection of a semantic theory of truth make his philosophy incapable to use language for philosophical and scientific purposes; insofar he considered language a source of inadequate knowledge, falsity, and error. Thus Spinoza finds contradiction in his inevitable use of language to express his philosophy. This paper has four aims: first, propose an explanation on why language is inadequate knowledge for Spinoza; second, present differences between inadequacy, falsity, and error in language; third, argue on the Spinozian use of the geometrical method as a solution for the adequate use …

Introduction, Benjamin Hill, Alberto Luis López

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

No abstract provided.

Nietzschean Problematics, Jacob Vangeest

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis is a commentary and exegesis on François Laruelle’s 1977 text Nietzsche contre Heidegger with a focus on the concept of the ‘Nietzschean problematic.’ It explores Laruelle’s use of Nietzsche by comparing his reading with that of Gilles Deleuze. This relation is explored in Deleuze and Laruelle’s reading of the Nietzschean problematic through the distinction between complementarity and supplementarity to enable a reading of Laruelle’s text as an extension of Deleuze’s project. This extension is one that simultaneously overturns what it extends. Laruelle’s aim is presented as a ‘machinic materialism’ infused with Derridean différance. Over the course of the …

Foucault, Affect, History: On The Art Of Feeling, Austin Chisholm

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While the work of Michel Foucault has not generally been thought to engage in questions of affect, I argue that his work entails a meaningful engagement with such questions but in a way that challenges how we tend to think about affect. Drawing from Foucault’s oeuvre, I enter a series of dialogues with thinkers of affect, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Brian Massumi, in order to understand to what extent the turn to affect—especially for Sedgwick and Massumi—represents an attempt to work through a number of difficulties and tensions in Foucault’s thought and writing. I argue …

Material Witness: Occult Affects In The Mystery Fiction Of The Fin De Siècle, Thomas Matthew Stuart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the nineteenth century progressed, Spiritualism blossomed from a religious movement to a cultural moment. While it remained an object of faith or ancillary faith, Spiritualism became as well a voice for radical reform, parlour entertainment, means of negotiating an increasingly mediated world, and so forth. Combined with enthusiasm for occult knowledge, Spiritualism offered intricately interrelated modes of narrating our relation to a consistently present past, in light of a rapidly approaching future. My project reads this fin-de-siècle fascination as a sensibility. Occult figures and spiritualist impulses, I argue, provide a vocabulary of feelings evoked in encounters with the mysterious. …

On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, And Computational Study, Jiangtian Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched …

Dancing Across Difference: Transforming Habitual Modes Of Being In The World Through Movement, Kimberly Dority

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although some important scholarly work has been done on race, and whiteness, in relation to habit, my account addresses the role of movement in habit through dance. Dance is well-suited for exploring habit since dancers cultivate an intimate knowledge of their bodies as habitual dancing bodies. I argue that dancing can offer critical insight into how habitual modes of being in the world may be shifted and changed. Dancers’ mastery of movement not only consists in sedimenting habits within the body, but also involves actively exploring how one’s own bodily movement can be altered (Ravn 2017; Damkjaer, 2015; Ingerslev, 2013; …

Berkeley On Infinite Divisibility, David Mwakima

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

Berkeley, arguing against Barrow, claims that the infinite divisibility of finite lines is neither an axiom nor a theorem in Euclid The Thirteen Books of The Elements. Instead, he suggests that it is rooted in ancient prejudice. In this paper, I attempt to substantiate Berkeley’s claims by looking carefully at the history and practice of ancient geometry as a first step towards understanding Berkeley’s mathematical atomism.

Berkeley On Perceptual Discrimination Of Physical Objects, Keota Fields

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

Commentators are divided over whether Berkeley holds that physical objects are immediately perceived by sense. As I read Berkeley, discrimination is necessary for perceiving physical objects by sense. Berkeley says that discrimination requires perceiving motion. Since motions can only be mediately perceived according to Berkeley, physical objects can only be mediately perceived by sense. I defend this reading against the following objections. First, that perception of physical objects is non-conceptual. Second, that physical objects are divinely instituted collections of ideas rather than psychologically associated collections of ideas. Third, that some physical objects are small enough to be immediately perceptually discriminated …

Browne’S Critique Of Religious Propositions In Berkeley: A Reply To Pearce, Benjamin Formanek

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

No abstract provided.

Informal Discussion, Todd Derose

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What types of problems--whether methodological, pedagogical, or philosophical--are unique to Berkeley scholarship?

Does Berkeley Anthropomorphize God, Kenneth Pearce

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

Berkeley occasionally says that we use analogy in thinking and speaking of God (Alc, §4.21). However, the scholarly consensus is that Berkeley rejects the traditional doctrine of divine analogy and holds instead that words like ‘wise’ apply to God in precisely the same way as they apply to Socrates. The difference is only a matter of degree (Daniel 2011; Curtin 2014; Pearce 2018; Fasko 2018). Univocal theories of the divine attributes have historically been charged with anthropomorphism—that is, with imagining God to be too similar to human beings (see Maimonides, Guide, ch. 1.1). Can Berkeley fairly be charged with anthropomorphizing …

Day 3 Schedule, Benjamin Hill

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

No abstract provided.

Thomas Reid And The Priority Thesis: A Defence Against Turri, Benjamin Formanek, Lewis Powell

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

No abstract provided.

What Makes Hume An External World Skeptic?, Graham Clay, David Landy, Nathan Rockwood

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

What would it take for Hume to be an external world skeptic? Is Hume's position on knowledge sufficient to force him to deny that we can acquire knowledge of (non-logical) propositions about the external world? After all, Hume is extremely restrictive about what can be known because he requires knowledge to be immune to error. In this paper, I will argue that if Hume were a skeptic, then he must also deny a particular kind of view about what is immediately present to the mind. I will argue that direct realisms—views that maintain that mind-independent (i.e. ontologically distinct) things are …