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Hegel Avec Kleist: On Marriage, Colby A. Chubbs

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates Hegel’s account of marriage in his Philosophy of Right as an ontological impasse which bears witness to a splitting and deadlock within his broader conception of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). As such, it is our aim to situate an opacity within the Hegelian self-conscious subject, as opposed to the subject attaining an inner self-awareness and transparently reflexive agency and, to this end, we put Hegel into conversation with his contemporary, Heinrich von Kleist. From this standpoint, we show in the first chapter how the thinker against whom Hegel formulates his account of marriage is Immanuel Kant …

Agnotologies Of Modernism: Knowing The Unknown In Lewis, Woolf, Pound, And Joyce, Jeremy Colangelo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Agnotologies of Modernism examines the productive role of ignorance in the work of several key modernist authors. Borrowing concepts from speculative realist philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and Jane Bennett, as well as such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, the dissertation endeavors to read modernism epistemologically, and treats ignorance as an active and creative force that often plays a key structuring role in the imaginative world of the text. Drawing from Bruno Latour’s notion of a “black box,” the study shows how ignorance can be transposed into an ontological entity which can then be attributed positive traits …

Autos, Allos, And World: Life And Identity In The Situation Of Contemporary Global Modernity, Thomas M. Szwedska

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

By bringing the machinic ontology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, together with Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s machinic theory of autopoiesis, this thesis presents a rethinking of world and identity in what we call the situation of contemporary global modernity. It argues that worlds and identity co-arise with one another through a poietic structuring. Globally, this is defined by organizational processes of autopoietic capitalism that attempts to self-separate from worlds. These processes involve an ontology of abstractive creation destruction, which continuously re-inscribe histories and identities in the image of capitalism. Locally, worlds and identities are structured by allopoietic processes, …

On The Role Of Mathematics In Scientific Representation, Saad Anis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I consider from a philosophical perspective three related questions concerning the contribution of mathematics to scientific representation. In answering these questions, I propose and defend Carnapian frameworks for examination into the nature and role of mathematics in science.

The first research question concerns the varied ways in which mathematics contributes to scientific representation. In response, I consider in Chapter 2 two recent philosophical proposals claiming to account for the explanatory role of mathematics in science, by Philip Kitcher, and Otavio Bueno and Mark Colyvan. My novel and detailed critique of these accounts shows that they are too …

For The Good Of The Thing, Sarah Louise Kristine Warren

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What is to be done about the thing? There is a growing interest in contemporary philosophy in re-considering the ontological status of the object – traditionally considered the passive substrate of human experience. This paper argues that, if we treat the object qua object seriously as an area of inquiry and attempt to accord it – à la Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter – a certain amount of agency, we can come to see it as both unique in its capacities and more than superficially enabling of subjective cognition. By using Jane Bennett’s aforementioned text, Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind theory, …

Basic Cable: Notes Toward Digital Ontology, Robbie Cormier

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis begins the work of constructing a fundamental ontology that employs the network automaton—a class of abstract computer program—as its model. Following a brief historical overview of the theory of network automata and its culmination in the work of Steven Wolfram, I examine how it bears on the ancient question concerning whether the continuous or the discrete has ontological primacy, consider the ontological status of materiality in consultation with Deleuzean ontology, and introduce the concept of prescience as a means of topologically mapping emergent patterns within the causal relations that compose the network. Finally, I will break the …

Shame And The Sharing Of Existence, Noel A. Glover

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Abstract: Our aim with this project is to re-animate shame, to argue that there are in fact two kinds of shame experience. The first, primary shame, refers to the exposure of the self by the primordial other, a moment prior to the interpolation of judgment and morality in which the self apprehends its object state before the other, fixed within its gaze. Primary shame is the revelation that I am insofar as the other sees me. Secondary shame, on the other hand, is the mobilization within the pale of society of this originary exhibition of self. Secondary shame is …