Philosophy Commons^™

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 …

Hannah Arendt’S Vision Of Politics: Exemplary Negativities And The Ostjuden, Jacob E. Pearce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hannah Arendt’s vision of politics is one of the most enigmatic, perplexing, thoroughly analyzed, and potentially generative aspects of her philosophic corpus. It is marked by insightful analysis, cutting deconstructions of pressing moral issues, and confusing vernacular wherein her analytic boundaries, topics, and categories appear obfuscated. Although it has been observed that Arendt’s late-career theory of the political owes a debt to her earlier writings on Jewish history, including her Kantian-influenced theory of political judgment and storytelling, in this thesis I would like to narrow down this debt to a specific trope: The Ostjuden, or the imagined associations with Eastern …

Matricide, Myth, And The Great Mother: An Asian Ecofeminist Reading Of Seolmundae (The Creator Of Jeju Island In Korea) And Nüwa (The Protector Goddess Of Chinese Mythology), Jea Sophia Oh

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This study is an Asian ecofeminist reading of two Great Mother Goddesses, Seolmundae (the Creator of Jeju Island in Korea) and Nüwa (the Protector Goddess of Chinese mythology). Nüwa (yin) cannot be reduced to just a counter part of Fuxi (yang) while Seolmundae cannot be shadowed as one of many other creation myths. Rather, they are the Great Mother, the Divine Feminine as the fecundity of Life, the healing Spirit, and the caring Heart which we have to discover and rescue from our forgotten histories to transform violent culture into caring and healing culture. The purpose of this study is …

Being In The Place Of Possibility, Laura Domencic

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

This paper explores my art practice as a phenomenological search for understanding how to be in the world. It begins with a description of my practice as a way to access the place of possibility that exists between faith and doubt. I examine materiality in art making to encourage consideration of both the physical and temporal nature of experience and to find balance with the increasingly incorporeal experience of the digital world. I discuss the materials and processes of drawing, sewing, and printmaking within their historical contexts. This paper connects my practice with artists who consider the act of perception …

Revisiting Juchitán: Witnessing An Indigenous Mexico Within The Latin American Archive, Michelle G. De La Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout archives of photographic collections, as one discovers the focused, artistic selective process of images that become part of a photographer’s collection, one must venture further and ask: will these choices be decisively remembered by an individual or collective audience or actively be dismissed, misunderstood, and denied presence? For my master’s thesis, I will be analyzing Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s photobook, Juchitán de las Mujeres, a photo-collection of the women-empowered indigenous society in Oaxaca, Mexico which erupted during Latin American photography’s prime in the 20th century, turning away from a deeply exoticized past and towards a celebration of Hispanism as …

Washing The River In Relation To Interpellation, Theatricality And Spectatorship, Patricia Miller

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Patricia Miller's Master of Fine Arts Thesis Paper

Commonsense Consent, Roseanna Sommers

Articles

Consent is a bedrock principle in democratic society and a primary means through which our law expresses its commitment to individual liberty. While there seems to be broad consensus that consent is important, little is known about what people think consent is. This Article undertakes an empirical investigation of people’s ordinary intuitions about when consent has been granted. Using techniques from moral psychology and experimental philosophy, it advances the core claim that most laypeople think consent is compatible with fraud, contradicting prevailing normative theories of consent. This empirical phenomenon is observed across over two dozen scenariosspanning numerous contexts in which …

Death Positivity: A New Genre Of Death And The Genre Function Of Memento Mori, Melony Elsie Del Real

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This article explores Caitlin Doughty’s “death positivity” as an evolved form of the medieval memento mori, and how this medieval genre serves as a genre function for current day thanatophobic audiences. This is specifically done by analyzing Doughty’s book titled Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, as well as some of her other death positivity mediums. By modeling her rhetoric of death positivity after memento mori, Doughty can effectively deliver her anti-death fearing message to the very audiences that fear death.

Furthermore, analyzing Doughty’s rhetoric as operating within the genre function, a concept put forth by Anis Bawarshi, …

The Chinese Calligraphy Stone Gallery, Yingying Xie

Student Works (2020-2029)

This dissertation studies the reshaping of cultural memory in helping to increase cultural self-confidence and to gain cultural identity. Nirvana Group placed great emphasis on promoting Chinese culture and on the basis of respecting culture; it has established the Chinese Calligraphy Stone gallery. This dissertation found that the Chinese Calligraphy Stone gallery which is specially constructed through the installation of represented structures of China showcased the Confucian principles and Taoist thought. Cultural memory has been reconstructed based on the permanent collection of diachronic masterpieces of the elite culture of calligraphy tradition. I would like to say that the spirit of …

Homo Ludens Moralis: Designing And Developing A Board Game To Teach Ethics For Ict Education, Damian Gordon, Dympna O'Sullivan, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Andrea Curley

Conference papers

The ICT ethical landscape is changing at an astonishing rate, as technologies become more complex, and people choose to interact with them in new and distinct ways, the resultant interactions are more novel and less easy to categorise using traditional ethical frameworks. It is vitally important that the developers of these technologies do not live in an ethical vacuum; that they think about the uses and abuses of their creations, and take some measures to prevent others being harmed by their work.

To equip these developers to rise to this challenge and to create a positive future for the use …

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.

Environmental Transformative Justice: Responding To Ecocide, Manuel Rodeiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation’s central objective is to normatively devise ethically appropriate sociopolitical and juridical responses to ecocide (i.e., grave environmental harm). More specifically, the work seeks to philosophically engage the ethical question of what is owed to human societies that are displaced due to intentional environmental destruction.

The motivation behind the project stems from the lack of academic research (excluding a pocket of recent analysis of the international community’s obligation to assist ‘climate refugees’) involving the question: “What ought to be afforded victims of environmental harm?” The dearth of scholarship is surprising, considering growing global concerns, vis-à-vis accelerating rates of environmental …

Queer Displacements: Minorities, Mobilities, And Mobilizations In French And Francophone Literature, Thomas Muzart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on the work of Virginie Despentes, Jean Genet, Guy Hocquenghem, and Abdellah Taïa, this dissertation challenges the antisocial turn taken in queer theory, by means of a parallel study of the authors’ geographical and intellectual itineraries. While critics like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman have suggested that the revolutionary potential in queer identity lies in its opposition to romanticized forms of community, I argue, along with José Esteban Muñoz, that their praising of singularity and negativity is similarly extreme. Alternatively, my study shows how the geographical displacements both experienced and imagined by my primary authors can illuminate the passage …

An Eco-Political Theory Of Territory, Jonathan Kwan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I advance a novel eco-political theory of territory that grounds a people’s territorial rights in its right to political self-determination understood as inextricably and normatively bound up with its right to ecological integrity and duty of ecological sustainability. I develop a social ontology of the people as the holder of territorial rights based on its members’ place-based common activities that aim at their own independent governance rather than in terms of state institutions, cultural nationhood, ethnogeography, political identity, or shared conceptions of justice. The common activities of a people generate a group right to democratic self-determination since …

Narcissus And Beauty: A Renaissance Of Paterian Aesthetics, Amir Dagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is intended as a correction to the almost universal contemporary assumption that beauty is either nonexistent or a tool of oppression, and that the arts should be judged less by their aesthetic value than their social, political, or moral dimensions. This dissertation will propose a fivefold argument. First, I will assert that the experience of beauty is real, pleasurable, and not in any way culturally determined, second, that beauty is the most significant and characteristic feature of art, third, that the rejection of the reality of beauty is motivated more by the fragility of the mass man’s ego …

British Romanticism And The Paradoxes Of Natural Education, Catherine S. Engh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“British Romanticism and the Paradoxes of Natural Education” offers a distinct perspective on Romantic-era ideas on “natural” education and human development. Though the Romantic retreat into nature has long been understood as a break from the Enlightenment’s programmatic commitment to the progress of reason, I contend that the ideas on natural development of four canonical Romantic authors—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley—actually originate in the ideas of one of the foremost figures of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Natural education is doomed to failure in Rousseau’s thought because “nature” is paradoxically a social construct. I argue that …

A Modelist Proposal, Jian Shen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many philosophers of mind regard "What is representation?" as a question of paramount importance. In ask this question they overlook the possibility—what I argue is in fact the correct answer—that there is simply nothing specifically representational about representational systems. "Representation" is a label we somehow feel compelled to stick to some systems but not to others, but it fails to pick out an explanatorily relevant kind. This is most clearly seen when we look at representational systems through the lens of formal models—in particular, the sender-receiver model as developed by David Lewis, Brian Skyrms, and others. I offer a cosmetically …

The Problem Of Literary Development In Russian Formalism And Digital Humanities, Basil Lvoff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interest of this dissertation is how our understanding of literary development—as gradual or revolutionary; self-governed or socio-politically determined; like or unlike biological evolution—informs the status, meaning, and value of literature and literary studies. The dissertation shows how this problem—most pressing in our post-logocentric age—was addressed at the dawn of contemporary literary theory by the Russian Formalists. The latter are compared with Distant Readers, i.e., the Digital Humanists from, or conducting research in dialogue with, the Stanford Literary Lab: Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, Ted Underwood, William Benzon, and others.

This dissertation argues that both Russian Formalism and Distant Reading were …

The Transformation Of R.A. Kosasih's Mahabharata Wayang Comics Design: Comparison Of The 1955 Version With The 1975 Version, Iwan Gunawan

International Review of Humanities Studies

Mahabharata was an epic Hindu story that has been adapted to comics for so many times, by many comic artists. R.A. Kosasih, was one that was known for his mastery in creatingWayang Comics, and Mahabharata was his best creation. He created two versions of Mahabharata comics. The first was in 1955, published by Melodi and the second in 1975, by Maranatha. The storylines were basically the same, but there were differences not only in formats or spelling system, but in the visual narratives. The pictures in Maranatha version were designed in a more up dated style in comics. In the …

Argo Navis: A Drifting Circumambulation, Kyle D. Lemstrom

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This work is a tongue-in-cheek narrative journey through the creative process, using travel and mythology as vehicles for reflection, metacognition, and critical thinking around philosophy, literature, and contemporary art. As a process-oriented piece, it makes use of intentional constraints to force a kind of unfolding, to mimic the act of intellectual discovery, navigating dissonance and doubt. As a creative product, it is something akin to an afterimage, to persist as a vestige of accumulated learning. The piece wrestles with questions of personal agency, authority, knowledge and meaning, yet does not arrive at definitive answers.