Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Beyond A Call To Action, Quinn A. E. Bohner

Summer Research

This paper is intended as a critique and development of morality in literature, seeking to prove that literature can have deep effects on a reader's moral character. The stakes for such research are rather high: especially during the pandemic, our culture is heavily informed by social and mass media, and it is hard to imagine a good future for the world if these mediums cannot shake the status quo.

Though this paper takes a narrower scope of investigation than moral progress itself, the reader should keep in mind that all of our practices of communication can and should be informed …

The Philosophies Of Love And Despair In Kierkegaard’S Early Aesthetic Works, James Conley

Summer Research

This paper tracks the philosophies of love (and correspondingly, despair) in Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Both were published pseudonymously in 1843 and detail the existential perspectives of Kierkegaard’s famous three life spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Each pseudonym discusses the categories of love and despair at length. By analyzing these three perspectives, the dialectics between the modes of existence illuminates itself and the messages and philosophy of each perspective wrestles with its counterparts. It is through this illumination of conflict that meaning and choice, in an existential sense, are born. This paper is meant …

Ars Moriendi: A Selection Of Texts Concerning The Phenomenon Of Death, Andrew Osborne

Book Collecting Contest Essays

Ars Moriendi: A Selection of Texts Concerning the Phenomenon of Death was an entry in the 2013 Collins Memorial Library Book Collecting Contest. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This book collection takes its title, Ars Moriendi (Latin for ‘the art of dying’), from a late medieval literary tradition consisting of texts that ‘guide’ readers through a rigorous programme that teaches the art of ‘dying well.’ (As the lore has it, if one were to follow the instructive dictates of an ars moriendi text verbatim, then one’s soul would be guaranteed salvation from …

Selfhood And The Unity Of Consciousness, Kate Hanniball

Summer Research

The focus of my summer research was a philosophical investigation of the concept of selfhood incorporating an emphasis on the physical realities of the brain, in particular bi-hemispheric communication between the right and left hemispheres via the neural pathway known as the Corpus Callosum.

Working within the theoretical framework of Derek Parfit the present research explored the question of selfhood by maintaining a focus on the unity of consciousness we all associate with the singular nature of the self. The theory of conscious unity--or the idea that at any one time all our phenomenal experiences are unified by the fact …