Continental Philosophy Commons^™

The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan

Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …

Japanese-English Translation: Thinking With Master Nishida, By Miki Kiyoshi, Parts 1 & 2 Of 4 (First Published In Fujin Kōron, August 1941) 日英翻訳：「西田先生のことども」、三木清著、総四章の第一章と第二章（初発婦人公論、昭和十六年八月）, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

日英翻訳文：「西田先生のことども」、総四章の第一章と第二章、三木清著

[Miki Kiyoshi--Thinking with Master Nishida, Parts 1 & 2 of 4]. Translated, revised, formatted, and edited by Christopher Southward, 2022-2023. All rights reserved

Miki Kiyoshi's account of his apprenticeship under Nishida Kitarō at Kyoto University with considerations of his mentor's unique contributions to Japanese philosophy through critical engagements with the West.

Romantic Citation And The Receding Future, Andrew Sargent

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation reads citation in Romantic literature as an aporetic movement between present and past, whereby what is cited becomes the receding ground on which the present and future’s erosion is inscribed. Citation exceeds quotation in that it forwards a disastrous intertextuality that retroactively determines not only past texts but events, histories, objects, and genres as accelerants that overshadow and ghost the present with its own extinction. Against generative modes of intertextuality such as those of Kristeva and Bakhtin in which texts’ repetitions of other texts facilitates the open-ended overturning and transformation of prior writing, citation precipitates a no future. …

Bergson On Poetics: Philosophy, Literature And Science, Michel Dalissier

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this paper, I analyze Henri Bergson’s insightful and contrasted vision of poetry. First, I show in what sense Bergson sympathizes with the idea that the poet must be credited to surpass the novelist in offering to us an unparalleled emotional apprehension of the world. Second, I nonetheless underline how Bergson grants the product of the poet, i.e., the poem itself, a problematic linguistic status, inasmuch as the focus of his analysis shifts from an intersubjective poetical apprehension of feelings to their individual poetic appreciation, or from the spiritual dimension of poetry to its material dimension. Third, I further suggest …

Filling The Vacant Space: A Close Reading Of Kant’S Dialectic Of Pure Practical Reason, Mae Ashraf Ali Saafan

Theses and Dissertations

The main aim of this thesis is to explore Kant’s central notion of rational belief. Kant’s account of rational belief could be viewed as the ground on which rational moral agents assent to propositions that enable them to avoid any practical incoherence as they engage in their moral duty.

The paper will offer a close reading of the dialectic of pure practical reason, particularly the doctrine of the postulates of practical reason. In this doctrine, Kant argues that although there is no theoretical proof for or against freedom, God, and the immortality of the soul, rational moral agents ought to …

Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …

Retranslation And Interpellation, Andrew Brooks

Living in Languages

No abstract provided.

The Flaneur In The Borsig Locomotive Works: Walter Benjamin, The Berlin Radio Youth Hour, And Sound As Pedagogy, Kevin S. Amidon

Modern Languages Faculty Publications

Walter Benjamin’s radio addresses for young people remain a comparatively neglected part of his work. New scholarship and translations have begun to address this, however. This arti- cle argues that the radio addresses, and particularly the address on the Borsig locomotive and machine works, deserve a prominent place within the critical and intellectual trajectory of Ben- jamin’s career. A close reading of “Borsig” demonstrates how the addresses model the modes of experience mediated by and through Benjamin’s master figure of the flaneur and generate the possibility for a historical pedagogy adequate to modernity. In the radio addresses, in general, and …

Speculative Realism And Systems Metaphysics, Martin Zwick

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent developments in Continental philosophy have included emergence of a school of “speculative realism” which rejects the human-centered orientation that has long dominated Continental thought, but also opposes naïve realism or positivism. Proponents of speculative realism differ on several issues, but most agree on the need for an object-oriented ontology. Speculative realists who draw upon Marxist thought identify realism with materialism, while others accord equal reality to objects that are non-material, even fictional. Several thinkers retain a focus on difference, a well-established theme in Continental thought. This paper looks at speculative realism from the perspective of the metaphysics of systems …

Civil War And Power: A Theoretical Inquiry, Can Guven

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a theoretical project that explores the conceptual nexus between civil war and power. It maps out a lineage of thought which posits civil war as a framework for explicating politics, not as a pre-political stage of savagery or a deteriorated condition of the socio-political order. Starting with Michel Foucault’s radical yet short-lived civil war thesis, which situates civil war as the matrix of relations of power, this investigation traverses the work of several theorists and philosophers who have drawn on, or departed from, this line of thought. It critically evaluates Giorgio Agamben’s use of the concept …

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

Inner Song Phenomenological Description Of A Musical Object Of Phantasy, Ellen Moysan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is the phenomenological description of a musical object of phantasy I call “inner song,” i.e., the music that the musician “sings in his or her head” while practicing his or her instrument. It describes the specific inner song of a single musician playing a melodic instrument, and rehearsing in a solipsistic situation. The description is based on three resources: my personal experience as a cellist; the third person experiences of other musicians I have interviewed on that topic since 2010; and the Husserlian corpus. Each chapter starts with excerpts of interviews focusing on specific aspects the inner song. …

Cultivating The Human Narrative: On Nietzsche, Science Fiction, And The Aesthetics Of Life., Derek Carpenter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I will argue that there is a specific model of morality which can account for the intuition about moral features that we take to be intrinsic to the human type. This model of morality is that of Virtue Ethics, but not a conventional kind of Virtue Ethics. Instead, I will argue that the moral philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche presents a model of cultivating narrative types that we take to be grounded in the kinds of beings we are, without resorting to any problematic metaphysical systems. This will require that I defend a novel interpretation of Nietzsche’s ethics …

Transient Constellations: Adorno, Benjamin, And The Actuality Of Idealism, Jeremy Arnott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin in critical constellation with German Idealism, specifically G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling. I explore how Adorno and Benjamin deconstruct and refashion Idealist notions, while also providing the post-Idealist theoretical armature to read Idealism in speculative directions. Through this mosaic, I pose questions regarding the actuality of philosophy, considering how thought might open itself towards a fuller spectrum of experience, while nonetheless remaining systematic, creating new (inter)disciplinary models of philosophy which tarry with the para-philosophical domains of art and nature. In the first part of this project, I provide …

The Extinction Race: Techniques Of The Human In Proust, Via Houellebecq, James Dutton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, “The Extinction Race: Techniques of the Human in Proust, via Houellebecq” James Dutton “reads” identity and race from the point of view of technics. Namely, he does so through the work of two nominally “Eurocentric” authors, Marcel Proust and Michel Houellebecq, observing how familial and racial resemblance is a living inscription of “lost time.” This inscription comes about through the technical means available to and constitutive of the categories which bind them. Thus, instead of furthering unfinishable racial distinctions which only serve to support discourses of racism, this article follows assertions made in the novels of …

Negation & Acosmism: Hegel's Acosmist Reading Of Spinoza, Jared Jones

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this thesis, I argue that Spinoza's views on negation are coupled with a view of being which, although Hegel misunderstands it to an extent, makes it impossible for finite things to exist, as Hegel's "acosmist" reading of Spinoza maintains. I begin by arguing that acosmism would present an internal problem for Spinoza's system in the Ethics, framing the importance of the topic and showing why Hegel's interpretation, as an interpretation, does not work. After that, I first provide an account of Hegel and Spinoza's views on negation. In the process, I give an account of Hegel's views on …

A Humanist's Account: Manetti On Humanism's Impact On Morality In 15th Century Italy., Connor Kurtz, Beau Kilpatrick

Undergraduate Research Events

Abstract

Religion, art, and politics were at their peak during the Italian Renaissance. However, because of the generously allocated talent of the Italian sphere at this time it is easy to overlook the contributions of those who broke away from the Catholic concentration and kick started this humanistic era. Giannozzo Manetti, an Italian politician who in 1452 wrote De Ignate er Excellencia Hominis, a challenge to Pope Innocent III’s philosophy. The text has been translated to “On Human Worth and Excellence” and describes a deep-rooted foundation of humanism in religion. He concludes a functionality of society and religion in …

Shifting Identities: Professorial Identification During Covid-19, Anthony Survance

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Building on existing studies of identification, this paper melds crisis research with studies of identity to understand how crises influence workplace identities. To accomplish this, the study addresses two research questions: (a) How are professors’ identities enacted during the COVID-19 crisis? And, how, if at all, does university rhetoric shape the enactment of identity during the COVID-19 crisis? This paper uses qualitative methods to get rich descriptions of professorial identities allowing research to get at the heart of how changes during the pandemic affected professors’ organizational, personal, professional, and workgroup identities. Overall, this study shows the pandemic encouraged professors to …

Ethics In The Breakdown: Levinas, Winnicott, And Schizoid Phenomena, Matthew J. Devine

Middle Voices

This article addresses the common concern that Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics amounts to a life-denying, moral masochism. To the contrary, I demonstrate close resonances between Levinas’ project and that of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, for whom the purpose of therapy is to feel alive. In the first section, I trace the Levinasian subject’s coming to be out of the impersonal Il y a. Exploiting the object-relations undertones, I emphasize that the Levinasian subject comes to be as fastened, riveted, or bound to existence, and thereafter seeks to loosen its bond to its existence. In the second section, I discuss Winnicott’s …

The Cynics' Understanding Of And Contribution To Philosophy, Yossra Hamouda

Theses and Dissertations

The Cynics are an understudied school in the history of philosophy especially, if we compare the amount of literature written on the Cynics to the amount of literature written on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other Greek schools like the Epicureans, the Neo-Platonists and even the Stoics. The lack of research interest in the Cynics, both from the side of philosophers and historians, is possibly grounded in a lack of interest in understanding the Cynical conception of philosophy. Unless we take a serious interest in understanding the Cynical conception of philosophy, we risk reducing the Cynics to the historical clowns of …