Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press And Fluxus, Meghan A. Dellacrosse

Theses and Dissertations

"Archival Enactment, Retelling 'The Big Book': Alison Knowles, Something Else Press and Fluxus," positions Knowles’ Big Book (1966) as a case study of historical methodology and interdisciplinary artistic practice in the post-war period. This comprehensive analysis of Big Book, a work of art no longer extant, contextualizes its publisher, Something Else Press through Dick Higgins’ concept of “intermedia,” and important lesser-known junctures relevant to Fluxus and the group’s leader George Maciunas are illuminated. Knowles' early and lesser-known silkscreen paintings are also examined.

Situationism And The Promise Of Virtue Ethics, Richard Barclay Holmes

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that it is possible to develop an empirically adequate form of virtue ethics even if one grants that situationism is true. I define situationism as a skeptical thesis about globalism, or the thesis that temporally stable and trans-situationally consistent character and personality traits are widely instantiated. Situationists such as John Doris and Gilbert Harman argue that globalism is an empirically inadequate thesis. While I accept Doris and Harman’s situationist thesis, they also make a further argument which is the subject of this dissertation. They argue that since globalism is empirically inadequate and Aristotelian virtue ethics …

Kant On Radical Evil, Kyoung Min Cho

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to propose an interpretation of Kant’s claim that the human being’s evil nature is the effect of the free power of choice. I suggest that if his concept of free choice is properly understood, Kant’s claim should be interpreted as follows: the human being’s radical evil is the effect of a failure to use freely the power of choice that determines its fundamental disposition, a failure that is to be presupposed as universal for all human agents. According to this reading, we are evil by nature since evil lies in our fundamental disposition. Still, …

Critical Affects: Laughter As Inquiry In First-Year Writing Courses, Nicholas James Learned

Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

CRITICAL AFFECTS: LAUGHTER AS INQUIRY IN FIRST-YEAR WRITING COURSES

by

Nicholas J. Learned

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015

Under the Supervision of Professor Dennis Lynch

In this dissertation, I work to rethink our current approaches to teaching critical thinking and writing in attempt to collapse the distance between the critical/rhetorical methods we teach in Rhetoric and Composition and the ways students interact rhetorically in their everyday lives. I am prompted to this line of inquiry by a problem I note in both theory and practice: the critical methods we teach in our writing courses rarely translate to real-world behaviors, …

Berkeley And The Mind Of God, Craig Berchet Knepley

Theses and Dissertations

I tackle a troubling question of interpretation: Does Berkeley's God feel pain? Berkeley's anti-skepticism seems to bar him from saying that God does not feel pain, for this would mean there is something to reality 'beyond' the perceptible. Yet Berkeley's concerns for common sense and orthodoxy bar him from saying that God does have an idea of pain. For Berkeley to have an idea of pain just is to suffer it, and an immutable God cannot suffer. Thus solving the pain problem requires answers to further questions: What are God's perceptions, for Berkeley? What are God's acts of will? How …

Rethinking Responding To Raymond: Re-Replying To Reproaches Of Transsexualism, Evan Isaiah Spencer

Theses and Dissertations

The topic of transsexualism was most prominently brought into the feminist movement's consciousness through the critical work of cultural radical feminist Janice Raymond. In this paper I will argue that the original response given by trans theorists to Raymond's critiques has allowed for the propagation of certain mistaken notions about trans people. In order to correct these misconceptions a different tack must be taken in responding to Raymond. I will begin by overviewing how two schools of feminist thought have lent themselves to theories of transsexualism, then focusing on radical feminist critique by Janice Raymond and a post-structural feminist response …

The Function Of Blame, Nihar Nandan Nilekani

Theses and Dissertations

This paper sets forth a theory of blame. Many currently proposed theories of blame fail to capture all instances of blame. This motivates a pluralism about blame, suggesting that there are many kinds of blame. These varieties of blame are nonetheless united in serving a particular function in our interpersonal decision making. This function is to flag the blamed behavior in such a way as to unsure that we factor it into future interactions with the blamed person. Thus any feature of our psychology that generally fulfills this function is a kind of blame. Since on this theory an instance …

Two Contemporary Metaethical Schemes Considered, Benjamin Serber

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines two of the more modern developments in the field of metaethics, expressivism and rational choice metaethics. Metaethics deals with a number of questions surrounding what we actually do when we engage in moral thought and speak in moral language. I approach the debate through the question of the objects of moral language. As metaethics has diversified away from straightforward moral realism, a number of candidates have been proposed as the actual referents of the moral terms we use. In expressivism, the object of moral language is taken to be certain nonpropositional attitudes held by the speaker of …

Constitutive Inescapability And The Search For Normative Authority, Henry Argetsinger

Theses and Dissertations

A recent family of views known as constitutivism represents a novel attempt to ground metaethics in the nature of action. A key move constitutivists make is to ground “normative authority” in the nature of our practical commitments – or, in other words, in the inescapability of a practical point of view. In the following paper, I argue that normative authority can emerge from inescapability, and articulate the strongest form of this constitutivist strategy – one that sees the aim of action as self-understanding. I then explore a recent set of objections that claims talk of “inescapability” cannot get us normative …

Life And Agency: Constitutivism And The Source Of Prescriptive Norms, Tristan De Liege

Theses and Dissertations

I explore a recent project in metaethics known as "constitutivism," and presents an outline of a new approach to that view. Constitutivism is an approach to moral realism that attempts to ground objective moral norms in the nature of action. This is done by showing that action has a constitutive aim, and that agents are committed to action, and so are thereby committed to that aim. Since agents can fulfill that aim with varying degrees of success, this aim generates a standard of evaluation. If this project succeeds, it would serve to make moral norms real and objective and simultaneously …

Gender As An 'Interplay Of Rules': Detecting Epistemic Interplay Of Medical And Legal Discourse With Sex And Gender Classification In Four Editions Of The Dewey Decimal Classification, Melodie J. Fox

Theses and Dissertations

When groups of people are represented in classification systems, potential exists for them to be structurally or linguistically subordinated, erased or otherwise misrepresented (Olson & Schlegl, 2001). As Bowker & Star (1999) have shown, the real-world application of classification to people can have legal, economic, medical, social, and educational consequences. The purpose of this research is to contribute to knowledge organization by showing how the epistemological stance underlying specific classificatory discourses interactively participates in the formation of concepts. The medical and legal discourses in three timeframes are examined using Foucauldian genealogical discourse analysis to investigate how their depictions of gender …

Everyday Workplace Ethics For The Millennial Business And Engineering Undergraduate Student: A Situated Learning Model, Nisha Kumar

Theses and Dissertations

Undergraduate ethics instruction in business and engineering can be broadly divided into two models – disciplinary ethics (integrated within a course where discussions about ethics pertain to a particular profession or discipline) and standalone ethics (where the concept of ethics and ethical conduct are discussed in broad, theoretical terms). While both these models have educational value, they have not been able to help the millennial undergraduate student with everyday routine ethical decision making that they might encounter in the workplace. This is largely because both these models do not consider the organizational or the cultural context (the context in which …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

Postcession, Evan D. Pomerantz

Theses and Dissertations

This is a series of daily writings. Each day consists of a new topic and is closed at the end of the day. The ideas presented are philosophical, humorous, rambling, lamentations, incantations, doubt-ridden, aesthetic pep talks which combine into an affective representation of my studio practice’s becoming. There will be little congruency, some stories, and a lot of parallels because that is who I am.