Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Critical Regionalism And The Contemporary Indian Workplace, Cynthia Lakshminarayanan

Art and Design Theses

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This paper represents an exploration into the expression of critical regionalism in a globalized design market. The research looks at the historical progression of Indian design and analyzes traditional concepts and patterns that can be melded with an international design language to create a design solution that speaks to both sides.

From Performer To Petrushka: A Decade Of Alexandra Exter's Work In Theater And Film, Laura A. Hunt

Art and Design Theses

The subject of my thesis is Russian artist Alexandra Exter’s work in the performing arts, with a focus on her theatrical set and costume designs in the Kamerny Theater, her creations for Iakov

Protazanov’s 1924 science fiction film, Aelita, and finally her exquisitely fabricated set of approximately forty marionettes. Within these colorful wooden figures are reconciled conflicting notions of stasis and dynamism, sculpture and performer, human and object. Drawing upon Victor Shklovskiĭ’s formalist definition of “enstrangement,” I examine her introduction of the object in place of the human performer as a means of exposing the creative process, forcing the …

"Now There's No Difference": Artificial Subjectivity As A Posthuman Negotiation Of Hegel's Master/Slave Dialectic, Casey J. Mccormick

English Theses

This thesis examines the theme of robot rebellion in SF narrative as an incarnation of Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic. Chapter one analyzes the depiction of robot rebellion in Karel Capek’s R.U.R. Chapter two surveys posthuman theory and offers close readings of two contemporary SF television series that exemplify ontologically progressive narratives. The thesis concludes that posthuman subjectivity sublates the Master/Slave dialectic and encourages practical posthuman ethics.

Dignified Animals: How "Non-Kantian" Is Nussbaum's Conception Of Dignity?, Mary Leukam

Philosophy Theses

Martha Nussbaum’s conception of dignity is integral to her capabilities approach. She argues that dignity is rooted in the flourishing and striving of animals. Her view is distinct from Kant’s, as Kant claims that persons have dignity in virtue of their rational nature. Though Nussbaum’s conception of dignity is important to her approach, its exact content and its relation to her thought is not clearly stated in her work, and I will attempt to provide an overview of Nussbaum’s conception of dignity. Also I will compare and contrast Nussbaum’s dignity with Kant’s (and contemporary Kantians’). Nussbaum provides four reasons for …

Rethinking Legal Retribution, Stephen Parsley

Philosophy Theses

In this paper I discuss retributivist justifications for legal punishment. I argue that the main moral retributivist theories advanced so far fail to support a plausible system of legal punishment. As an alternative, I suggest, with some reservations, the legal retributivism advanced by Alan Brudner in his Punishment and Freedom.

Palamedes, Paul A. Cantrell

English Theses

This thesis offers a syncretic, synoptic account of Palamedes from the Trojan War. It delineates three interpretive modes: (1) that Palamedes was present all along; (2) that later poets inserted him into the Trojan narrative, either as an archetypal intellectual figure, or as Odysseus’s double; (3) that Palamedes was present only as Odysseus’s imaginary Doppelgänger. The thesis accounts for Palamedes’s scarce attention in classical texts by way of Lacanian and—via Otto Rank—Freudian psychoanalytic theory, as well as by Slavoj Žižek’s adoption of the “vanishing mediator.” After tracing a potential textual genealogy from Palamedes to Malory’s Palomydes, the thesis concludes …

Sounds Carefully Crafted: Dionysius Of Halicarnassus And Literary Composition, Francisco Lopez

English Theses

Modern rhetoric takes many influences from the classical era, but aural components of rhetoric are not often included in rhetorical education. This paper examines the techniques used by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his essay On Literary Composition, where he explored the components of arrangement of words in clauses for greatest impact when read and spoken aloud. Dionysius utilized meter and aesthetic placement of words to create work that was technically skilled and appealing to the listener or reader.

Dionysius built on ideas from rhetoricians of 4^th and 5^th century BCE Athens for his definition of style. His writing …

Best Of, Nimer I. Aleck Ii

Art and Design Theses

The majority of modern popular trophies seem to act as memorials to small victories. Foiled plastic figures sitting atop extruded tubes of holographic tape are given for everything from internationally recognized achievement to participation in regional events. These architectural sculptures are icons of success. This thesis explores the themes, processes, and contexts that inform the ways that we perceive value. Using the iconography of the popular modern trophy, this thesis and the artwork associated with it examines the constructs of value within visual culture. My goal is to display and understand the way we appreciate and define that which implies …

You're Wearing The Orange Shorts? African American Hooters Girls And The All American Girl Next Door, Rachel E. Cook

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Theses

Hooters restaurants are typically staffed by Caucasian women that resemble the company’s idea of an “All American Girl, Surfer Girl, Girl Next Door” image, promoted in employee training materials. However, my experience working for this company has been in a predominantly African American-staffed Hooters, atypical for the corporation. Through a mixed methods approach encompassing content analysis, participant observation, autoethnography, and interviews, this research seeks to understand the ideal Hooters Girl image promoted by the corporation, and the performance of that ideal in an atypical Hooters location.

"Born Every Minute": Reworking The Mythology Of The American Medicine Show, Owen C. Cantrell

English Theses

This thesis investigates the historical American medicine show of 1880-1900 through the lens of contemporaneous social and cultural debates, primarily regarding class and race relations. The medicine show pitchmen, the central figure of the medicine show, is the progeny of the confidence man of the mid to late-nineteenth century, best personified through the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and P.T. Barnum and novels of Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The confidence man utilized a performative identity directed towards the assumed needs and desires of his audience, which gave him a purely pragmatic orientation. As the confidence man filtered through emerging forms …

But What Kind Of Badness?: An Inquiry Into The Ethical Significance Of Pain, Andrew L. Hookom

Philosophy Theses

In this thesis, I argue against a claim about pain which I call the "Minimization Thesis" or MT. According to MT, pain is objectively unconditionally intrinsically bad. Using the case of grief, I argue that although MT may be true of pain as such, it is not true of particular pains. I then turn to an examination of the justification provided by Thomas Nagle for offering the MT and find that his argument is inadequate because it depends on an implausible phenomenology of pain experience. I argue it is more plausible to claim, as Kant does, that pain has desire-conditional …

Recovery & Recognition: Black Women And The Lower Ninth Ward, Jamesia J. King

Africana Studies Theses

Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005 and drastically altered the city of New Orleans causing the most damage to minority and low socioeconomic status communities such as the Lower Ninth Ward. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, African American women in the New Orleans constituted the group most marginalized in society. Following Hurricane Katrina, several studies have explored Hurricane Katrina and disaster recovery in New Orleans. However, few studies have explored gender as it relates to natural disasters and recovery. Therefore, this study explores the experiences of African American women with disaster recovery in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Rational Requirements For Moral Motivation: The Psychopath's Open Question, Maria L. Montello

Philosophy Theses

Psychopaths pose a challenge to those who make claims about the strength of moral assessments. These individuals are entirely unmoved by the moral rules that they articulate and purportedly espouse. Psychopaths appear rationally intact but are emotionally broken. In some cases, they commit horrendous crimes yet show no guilt, no remorse. Sentimentalists claim that the empirical evidence about psychopaths’ affective deficits supports that moral judgment is rooted in emotion and that psychopaths do not make genuine moral judgments—they can’t. Here, I challenge an explanation of psychopathy that indicts psychopaths’ emotional impairments alone. I conclude that there are rational requirements for …

Non-Cooperative Communication And The Origins Of Human Language, Steven M. Beighley

Philosophy Theses

Grice (1982) and Bar-On and Green (2010) each provide 'continuity stories' which attempt to explain how a human-like language could emerge from the primitive communication practices of non-human animals. I offer desiderata for a proper account of linguistic continuity in order to argue that these previous accounts fall short in important ways. I then introduce the recent evolutionary literature on non-cooperative communication in order to construct a continuity story which better satisfies the proposed desiderata while retaining the positive aspects of the proposals of Grice and Bar-On and Green. The outcome of this project is a more tenable and empirically …

The Role Of Poetry And Language In Hegel's Philosophy Of Art, Daniel Griffin

Philosophy Theses

Hegel's view of poetry clarifies the overall role of language in his system and allows him to makes sense of a difficult linguistic issue: how to distinguish between poetry and prose. For Hegel, this distinction is crucial because it illuminates the different ways poetry and prose allow us to understand ourselves as members of an ethical community. In this paper, I argue, using Hegel, that the distinction between poetry and prose can only properly be understood in terms of their fundamentally different kinds of content instead of in terms of any formal differences between the two. Then, I address an …

Nietzsche On Copernicus, Shane C. Callahan

Philosophy Theses

I show that we have reason to believe a view on scientific theory change can be discerned in what I call the “Copernicus passages” of Nietzsche’s published work—specifically, the incommensurability thesis. Since this view denies what Maudemarie Clark calls the “equivalence principle,” she claims incommensurability cannot reasonably be attributed to Nietzsche. I argue, however, that we can reasonably attribute incommensurability to Nietzsche in the Copernicus passages, so my reading should not be ruled out. The first upshot to this project is that I provide a reading of passages that have received no scholarly attention to date. The second upshot is …

Die Totenzettel Aus Dem Ersten Und Zweiten Weltkrieg: Soziale Bedeutung Für Das Image Der Männlichkeit, Monika Schulte

World Languages and Cultures Theses

Gerade zur Zeit der beiden grossen Weltkriege wurden sehr viele Soldatentotenzettel gedruckt. Diese waren grundsätzlich als religiöse Erinnerungsstücke gemeint, jedoch kann man bei ihrer Betrachtung den weltlichen Aspekt nicht ausser Acht lassen. Im folgenden soll argumentiert werden, dass die Darstellungen und Texte auf diesen sterbezetteln einen sozialen Einfluss auch auf die Darstellung der Männlichkeit für die Gesellschaft ausüben sollten. Dabei wurden vierundvierzig Totenzettel des Ersten- und fünfzig des Zweiten Weltkriegs des münsteraner Raumes aufgefunden und analysiert.

The Promise And Limits Of Natural Normativity In A Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, Timothy J. Clewell

Philosophy Theses

In this thesis I distinguish between two conceptions of naturalism that have been offered as possible starting points for a virtue based ethics. The first version of naturalism is characterized by Philippa Foot’s project in Natural Goodness. The second version of naturalism can be found, in various forms, among the works of John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, and Rosalind Hursthouse. I argue that neither naturalistic approach is entirely successful on its own, but that we can fruitfully carve a path between both approaches that points the way to a positive ethical account. I then conclude with a brief sketch of what …

Normative Judgments, 'Deep Self' Judgments, And Intentional Action, Jason S. Shepard

Philosophy Theses

Sripada and Konrath (forthcoming) use Structural Equation Modeling techniques to provide empirical evidence for the claim that implicit and automatic inferences about people’s dispositions, and not normative judgments, are the driving cause behind the pattern of folk judgments of intentional action in Knobe’s (2003a) chairman case. However, I will argue that their evidence is not as strong as they claim due to the potential of methodological and statistical problems with the way they tested their model. After correcting for these problems, I show that even after accounting for the role of dispositional inferences, normative judgments are still playing a significant …

Autonomy, De Facto And De Jure, Paul Tulipana

Philosophy Theses

On a standard philosophical conception, being autonomous is roughly equivalent to having some particular natural capacity. This paper provides argues that this conception is incorrect, or at least incomplete. The first chapter suggests that adopting an alternative conception of autonomy promises to resolve to several objections to the metaethical constitutivism, and so promises to provide highly desirable theory of moral reasons. The second chapter first motivates a broadly Kantian account of autonomous action, and then gives reasons to think that Kant's own development of this theory runs into damaging action-theoretic problems. The way to address these problems, I argue, is …

Providing Assurance On Scanlon's Account Of Promises, Hunter T. Thomsen

Philosophy Theses

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Thomas Scanlon provides a theory of why we ought to keep our promises according to which the wrong of breaking a promise is a moral wrong that does not depend on any social practice. Instead a promise provides a recipient with assurance and the value of assurance establishes a moral obligation to keep our promises. However, it is often charged that theories like Scanlon’s are untenable because they are subject to a vicious circularity. I address some recent critics of Scanlon’s theory, all of whom maintain that his account does not …

The Fundamental Naturalistic Impulse: Extending The Reach Of Methodological Naturalism, James B. Summers

Philosophy Theses

While naturalistic theories have come to dominate the philosophical landscape, there is still little consensus on what “naturalism” means. I trace the origins of contemporary naturalism to a view, called the “fundamental naturalistic impulse,” that originates in Quine’s turn against Carnap and which I take to be necessary for naturalism. In light of this impulse, some “substantively naturalistic” theories are examined: a weak version of non-supernaturalism, Railton’s a posteriori reduction of moral terms, and “Canberra plan” conceptual analyses of moral property terms. I suggest that if we take the fundamental naturalistic impulse seriously, then there is no need to differentiate …

The Function Of Religion In Selected Novels Of George Gissing, Lawton A. Brewer

English Dissertations

ABSTRACT George Gissing has experienced a fluctuating reputation among critics in the period of over one hundred years since his death in 1903. Curiously, during the last decade of his life, many critics put Gissing on a par with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith among writers living at that time. Early in his career, however, his reputation suffered from the notion that Gissing was simply a naturalist with a pessimistic, atheistic streak. To some extent, this appraisal has some merit. Gissing pronounced himself an unbeliever to family and to acquaintances such as Fredrick Harrison as early as 1880. Nonetheless, Gissing …