Philosophy Commons^™

Cutting The Puppet Strings: Confronting The Singularity, Gabriel Joesph Weiss

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Modern technology has excelled at an unprecedented rate. The rise of artificial intelligence raises many ethical questions and concerns for humanity, as it has incited many pressing debates between philosophers, computer scientists, and social critics who share concerns for the future of humanity but conflict with one another regarding whether or not we should rely on technology to govern human affairs and control society's infrastructures. Drawing from Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Hubert Dreyfus, and others, this project weighs out the probabilities and problems of the technological singularity posited by Ray Kurzweil, confronting our habits of addressing technology and the way …

Selfish, Jacopo Mavica

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Decentered, Together, Alone: Thinking The Virtual World With Heidegger’S Being And Time, Margaux Juliette Suinat

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

A Wordless Wild Cadence, Isaac Alexander Zaslow King

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

How Aesthetics Shape Our Ethics: Exploring Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, And Digital World, Nika Kokhodze

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Every day, we encounter numerous amount of images, films, news and propaganda. The different forms and manifestations of aesthetics haunts our lives daily. What if I told you that Aesthetics has immense amount of power? This project aims specifically at that as it explores authoritarian states and the liberal democracies alike. How could the moral compass that we all cherish and hold dearly be predicated and shaped by something so remote as aesthetics? Exploring through examples from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the digital world we all live in, one might find some answers and the right questions to …

On Eager Tenterhooks, A. Rose Levi

Senior Projects Spring 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

A Feeling, Julianne Emma Arnold

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In this paper I use Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, specifically, considerations of the meaning of a word, in order to establish a groundwork for, and further illuminate, the messier areas of thinking about thinking and feeling about feeling that seem to occur across time. This "messier", and perhaps even physical, under-grid creating our feelings across time is one that I paint to shift endlessly, in its own ever shifting moments of sentiment comparison. It is also one that I undertake to comprehend using a similarly configured process of infinitely splitting methods of thinking and feeling.

Letter Blocks, Lukas Graham Hemmer

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A collection of prose and poetry exploring language as a material object.

After Translation, Sofia Koukia

Senior Projects Spring 2019

While not devaluing translation as such, through a detailed analysis of interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic translation, I intend to show, in this essay, how it is the case that ‘the meaning of a word’ is such a complex entity that no attempt to translation can replicate it. Through my examination of a select collection of original and translated words and entities, I want to provide the reader not with a linguistic theory about translation but with a method of approaching linguistic meaning with respect to a word's particulaties, context, and implications.

It Will Depend On Where The Question Is Used: Freud On Dreams In The Light Of Wittgenstein On Images, Matteo Waldinger-White

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

An exploration of Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis conducted in the light of Wittgenstein's suggestions about seeing and image appraisal in Part II, Section Xi of Philosophical Investigations.

Punishing Assemblages: A Queer, Decolonizing Theory Of The American Prison, Liam Hopkins

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Second Language: An Argument For The Superlative Authenticity Of Poetry Through The Complex Personal Relationships It Develops With Its Audiences By Way Of Truth In Metaphor, C Mandler

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that poetry allows for a kind of expression that is not found within other uses of language. This is because the poetic form is able to better lend itself to larger notions of not only truth, but also authenticity, which it achieves through the building of complex emotional engagements between a work of poetry and its audience. When discussing the authenticity of poetry, one’s personal connection to the work by way of metaphor is more truthful than the so-called literal truth one comes to when one reads something exactly as it is written—meaning …

The Creation Of Power: Leaving The Closed Space Of Voluntary Servitude, Isabel Mae Torgove

Senior Projects Spring 2018

This project is a collection and absorption of concepts and frameworks drawn from centuries of thought. Indebted to the past, this philosophical and literary journey seeks to elucidate a productive path to follow in the wake of the “moment,” derived from Du Bois’ “double consciousness.” This split second explosion, resulting in the severance of the conception of the self from the world’s perception of the self, places one in the position of either submitting voluntarily to the dominant forces or producing and creating something, anything, to aid in the search for understanding the self. The transitive property of a split …

Two Concepts Of Education, Vikramaditya H. Joshi

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The foundation of the current discourse on education is grounded in the funding and distribution of a ‘good’ called education. The Common Core State Standards, as a set of shared goals stipulated by the federal government, considers education to be a “stepping stone” towards joining the workforce in a competitive global marketplace. The lexicon of economic commodities instrumentalizes education due to its tacit assumption that education is a means to an occupational end. It treats education as an individual possession deposited by a school, via its teachers, into …

“Oh, Phaedrus, If I Don’T Know My Phaedrus I Must Be Forgetting Who I Am Myself”: Glimpses Of Self In Divine Erotic Madness, Jared De Uriarte

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Film No Longer Telling A Story; Film Itself As The Story: Reflexive Constructions In Alfred Hitchcock And Jean-Luc Godard, Amy Ertie Chabassier

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Here, Thinking, Nicolas Ocean Shannon

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Curation Of Worldviews, Jason Toney

Senior Projects Fall 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Heidegger's Attentiveness To Language: A Question Of Translation And "Original Contents", Alexander M. Moore

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

The Lens Of Language, Eli Ridley Segal

Senior Projects Fall 2015

This project seeks to contextualize the iconic philosophical questions regarding skepticism, object existence, perception, and emotion, within the discourse of ordinary language philosophy. Aided by Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, I argue for the non existence of objects-in-themselves. This provides the scaffolding for an examination of perception and emotion unhindered by a reliance on, or appeal to, the so-called 'objective world.' Recognizing the influence exerted by language over our conscious experience, I argue for an ordinary-language formulation of embodied cognition. With this in mind, I demonstrate the philosophical implications of such a picture through the canonical problem of 'other minds.' Ultimately …

The World Through Your Eyes: An Analysis Of Spike Jonze's Her, Thatcher Kupple Snyder

Senior Projects Fall 2015

The skeptical concerns of Spike Jonze's Her mirror those of Stanley Cavell's, representing a cinematic adaptation of his therapeutic analysis of philosophical skepticism. Her addresses the loneliness of the skeptic, and demonstrates a way by which one can pacify, or better understand, the skeptical impulse.