Continental Philosophy Commons^™

‘I Have Regained Memory’ (Smṛtir Labdhā): The Bhagavad Gītā As A Parrhesiastic Journey Against Forgetfulness, Raquel Ferrández-Formoso

Comparative Philosophy

This paper proposes an interdisciplinary reading of the Bhagavad Gītā, presenting it as a parrhesiastic dialogue between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna, and focusing on the importance attached to memory. Foucault’s studies on the exercise of parrhesia (“true speech”) in the Greco-Roman context, but also Heidegger's views on the original memory, and Abhinavagupta’s commentary to the Bhagavad Gītā have been used as important tools of interpretation. Devotion is described as the constant memory of Kṛṣṇa, through which the practitioner succeeds in substituting some subconscious dispositions (saṃskāras) for others, building a psychic memory that allows for liberation at the time of …

Questions Concerning Attention And Stiegler’S Therapeutics, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler’s recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu’appelle-t-on Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples of this flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for …

Ood For The Ghosts: Reading Ruin’S Being With The Dead With Nietzsche, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

A focus on roots, localizations, usurpations, and obliterations together with commemoration and different fields of scholarly research, along with a thematic focus on Homer’s Nykia, permit Hans Ruin to revisit the foundations of history in Being with the Dead. Ruin draws on cultural sociology, including the work of Alfred Schütz, as well as Heideggerian historicity and the dead of the distant past, including archaeology and ethnography, paleography and physical anthropology. Ruin also engages Michel de Certeau’s Writing of History and its focus on the other in a necropolitical account tracked through interdisciplinary fields. In my reading I supplement Ruin’s critical …

Object-Oriented Musicology: Some Implications Of Graham Harman's Philosophy For Music Theory, History, And Criticism, Eric Taxier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation brings the ideas of the philosopher Graham Harman (b. 1968) into a musicological context. His “object-oriented ontology” is widely known in continental philosophy, but it has not yet entered rigorous contact with musicology. Certain factors pose difficulties at first glance, such as Harman’s focus on metaphysical issues (originating in his critique of Martin Heidegger) and his rehabilitation of the widely criticized concept of aesthetic autonomy. But these are also sources of novelty that could make an object-oriented encounter with musicology fruitful. In the first chapter, I outline the main features of Harman’s thought. He critiques assumptions about the …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

A Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Gifts, Mary Eberhardinger

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project synthesizes a selected scope of rhetorical and philosophical perspectives of the gift. The research question is what the relationship between gifts and rhetoric might be. In order to approach this question, this project offers a review of related literature on the topic of gifts. It then provides analysis and discussion that contextualize the question. The project finally concludes by offering implications. The implications address why the question concerning the relationship between gifts and rhetoric matters for the larger landscape of international relations.

Relations And Folds In Leibniz: Monadological Intimacy, Jeff Lambert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My goal is to provide a clear explanation of Leibniz’s notoriously difficult system of relations. Relations among ‘windowless’ substances that exert no causal power over one another seems like a pipe dream that should be abandoned. However, I demonstrate that each substance expresses its relations only through the unique representation of all other substances. That is, any relation a substance expresses is due to this unique, perspectival, non-causal, representation of others. Because this is the case for all substances, this means that this relation of representation is an ongoing process of interconnection for all substances. This representation is not merely …

The Appearance Of The Other Ego In Edmund Husserl’S Phenomenology, Paul Zipfel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this work I investigate Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the appearance of the other ego in order to elucidate the essential components of the sense of the other ego: co-constitution, inaccessibility, and a unique process of verification. I open with an example illustrating the way in which other egos appear to me as different from ordinary objects in the world. When one looks outside in a storm and sees a branch rapping on the window, it is not an alarming experience. However, were another person to be rapping at the window, the experience would be quite different. This is …

The In/Authentic Subject: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, And Selfhood, Joseph Tighe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation represents an attempt to understand the self, what it is, what it means, and how it provides subjective identity. These concerns are situated within a personal narrative that describes the loss of self and its rediscovery subsequent to that loss. In critically examining the work of both Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger on the concept of authenticity, I have attempted to come to terms with my experience of the loss of selfhood as well as the conditions of possibility for its return. I argue that Kierkegaard’s construction of the self, while problematically religious, convincingly describes the experience of …

The Problem Of Nature In The Phenomenology Of Merleau-Ponty, Alessio Rotundo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I show that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of nature yields a double meaning: nature as ensemble of genetic and productive processes that are attainable in experience (phenomenal nature) and nature as that which enables this experience (transcendental nature). My thesis is that the two meanings of nature, when taken together, offer a guide to Merleau-Ponty’s final philosophical formulations about “flesh” and the “visible” and the “invisible.” The aim of the dissertation is to trace the salient conceptual and methodological complications entailed by this conception. I argue that the bivalence of the problem of nature in Merleau-Ponty receives a methodological …

The Psychology Of Dystopian And Post-Apocalyptic Stories: The Proverbial Question Of Whether Life Will Imitate Art, Donna Roberts

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic genres challenge our notions of Aristotelian mimesis vs Anti-mimesis – i.e., In the study of the human condition, does life imitate art or art imitate life? Popular culture, then and now, provides us with examples to depict the circularity of these notions and the psychological importance of exploring this aspect of human nature, particularly the contemplation of our own collective demise. While we recoil in horror at the images these genres portray, we are also morbidly fascinated by them, and we can’t help but ask ourselves . . . Could that really happen? Will that happen?

Comment …

Critical Veganism: A Posthuman Understanding Of ‘Becoming With’ Others, Kensey Dressler

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis lays the groundwork for a critical vegan orientation to posthuman communication research. Critical veganism attempts to do the least amount of harm to nonhuman beings, a shift that decenters the human in scholarship and focuses on the material realities of nonhuman beings. This orientation helps create a praxis for posthuman research that is in line with a new materialist approach to ontology, is anti-capitalist, and strives to do the least harm. Previous research methods tend to be anthropocentric in nature, thus leaving out nonhuman experiences from communication research. Using both autoethnography and multi-species ethnography as my methods, I …

01. Richard C. Richards, I Hardly Knew Ye, Peter Francev

Praxis, Poems, and Punchlines: Essays in Honor of Richard C. Richards

I first met Richard Richards at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in the fall of 1996. I was a Freshman who had a curious interest in philosophy; yet, at the time, I was a Biology major planning of a life in Hawaii where I’d be conducting research on sharks while teaching at the University of Hawaii and surfing before and after work. Little did I know that my life would be changed forever, after a chance meeting with Richard. [excerpt]

On Ways Of Studying Tolkien: Notes Toward A Better (Epic) Fantasy Criticism, Dennis Wilson Wise

Journal of Tolkien Research

This article examines major academic approaches used in the study of J.R.R. Tolkien. It argues that certain themes from political philosopher Leo Strauss, by helping us to develop a new theoretical lens, can elucidate several politically salient aspects of Tolkien's work, including thymos and his dialectic between ancient and modern. Four previous (though flawed) Straussian interpretations of Tolkien are highlighted. Finally, by analyzing the tensions that arise when pairing critical theory and its attendant bias against nature with Tolkien and epic fantasy, this article argues for the timeliness of a Straussian lens for studying fantasy and Tolkien alike.

A Thin Line Between Sovereign And Abject Agents: Global Action Thrillers With The Sci-Fi Mind-Game War On Terror, Seung-Hoon Jeong

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Seung-hoon Jeong discusses in his paper global action thrillers about the war on terror. He highlights the biopolitical abjection of counterterrorist agents from their state agencies. This abjection ends up either self-reaffirming in the manner of a sovereign agent (the Bond series) or terrorizing their sovereign system (the Bourne series), while both are trapped in the vicious cycle of terror and counterterror. More notable is the “mind-game” sci-fi genre. Source Code, among others, stages a loop of a traumatic counterterrorist mission with retroactive causality, a closed circuit of neoliberal productivity and pathological abjection in a video-game narrative. The time-travel …

African American Existential Heroes: Narrative Struggles For Authenticity, Michael Cotto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

African American Existential Heroes: Narrative Struggles for Authenticity argues for the development of existential authenticities and their impact on African American self-identity constructions in three African American literary classics:

Richard Wright’s The Outsider, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. For that purpose, the introduction puts forward the aforementioned topic; defines the major terms, authenticity, existentialism, and African Americanness; identifies the three texts to be studied; explicates its methodology; studies the anagnorisis of each text in relation to the existential crisis; accounts for the existential philosophers used, Martin …

Failures Of Grace: Limits Of Tragedy In The Late Nineteenth-Century Novel, Anick S. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Failures of Grace argues that nineteenth-century novelists challenge the hegemonies of literary form and the value of personal suffering through what I call the trans-genre tragic novel. This new form is emblematic of a period in which values hang in the balance and places traditional values at odds with themselves by combining the low form of the novel with the highest mimetic mode in the Western tradition: tragedy. It simultaneously proposes the most vulnerable members of society as tragic heroes in contrast to the noble figures who previously were presumed to define the genre.

Through close readings of works by …

Objectivity, Dagfinn Føllesdal

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

The “Indirect Message” In Kierkegaard And Chán Buddhism, Zdeněk Zacpal

Comparative Philosophy

The article seeks to analyse Kierkegaard’s indirecte Meddelelse, which the author proposes to translate as ‘indirect message’. It attempts to consider and illuminate this concept and its general characteristics, types and cases in Kierkegaard's work. They are to serve as a baseline for investigations of indirect messages in Buddhism, especially the famous ‘public cases’ (gong-àn / kōan 公案) of the Chán Buddhists. The author tries to specify indirect messages on both sides of the cultural divide in terms of some Western philosophers. Kierkegaard’s theoretical rationale for his indirect message is profound, sophisticated and appropriate to the theoretical …

Anarchaeologies: Reading As Misreading [Table Of Contents], Erin Graff Zivin

Literature

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Our critical moment, Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art.

Rather than applying concepts from philosophy in order to understand or elucidate cultural works, the book exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art and activism to one another. Working specifically …