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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Critical Interventions In The Medical Humanities, Maryam Golafshani
Critical Interventions In The Medical Humanities, Maryam Golafshani
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis makes three novel critical theoretical interventions in the medical humanities. The first uses Benjamin’s critical theory of art in the age of its technological reproducibility to reveal that the evidence-based biomedical model’s primary function is not to cure patients, but to prescribe politics. The technological reproducibility of evidence-based biomedicine transforms medicine so it can no longer perceive—or encounter—patients as unique, whole, and above all situated beings. The second intervention uses Sara Ahmed’s feminist phenomenology to theorize ethical encounters between medicine and its “others”—patients and literature—in such a way that particularizes the encounter, not the other itself. …
Preparing To Receive: On The Revolutionary Questioning Of Being And Time, Joshua Livingstone
Preparing To Receive: On The Revolutionary Questioning Of Being And Time, Joshua Livingstone
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
From the question of the meaning of being to the question concerning technology, the theme of questioning runs through the whole of Martin Heidegger’s work and plays a key role in the development of his thought. Despite its importance, however, it is a theme that has largely been left unexplored. This thesis is intended as the beginning of a corrective to a long overdue examination of Heideggerian questioning. I give a close, inner-textual analysis of questioning as it appears in Being and Time. By following Heidegger’s explicit commentary on and implicit use of questioning, I demonstrate that the question of …
A New Framework For Enactivism: Understanding The Enactive Body Through Structural Flexibility And Merleau-Ponty’S Ontology Of Flesh, John Jenkinson
A New Framework For Enactivism: Understanding The Enactive Body Through Structural Flexibility And Merleau-Ponty’S Ontology Of Flesh, John Jenkinson
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
The enactive approach to cognition and consciousness offers a valuable alternative to the standard approaches dominant in the sciences of mind. As an embodied account, enactivism incorporates theoretical perspectives on the body from phenomenology, cognitive science, and biology, which provides a unique interpretation of embodiment with critical insight into the embodied nature of cognition and consciousness. Nonetheless, I argue that several revisions are required to make enactivism viable within the context of the sciences of mind. The enactive account of subjectivity is problematic, in light of arguments developed in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later texts, because it is implicitly dualistic. I demonstrate …
In-Between What Once Was And What Is Yet To Come: On The Phenomena Of Bereavement And Grieving, Rachel L B Bath
In-Between What Once Was And What Is Yet To Come: On The Phenomena Of Bereavement And Grieving, Rachel L B Bath
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
When a significant other dies, our lives can be shattered and our worlds upended. We may find that we no longer know how to make sense of our experiences or how to engage in our practical activities. Nothing can be as it was before because the world as we once knew it has ended, and we are no longer the same persons we once were. Nonetheless this ending opens up something new because the death of the other changes the possibilities of our lived world. A phenomenological analysis of the phenomena of grief and bereavement reveals that while bereavement undermines …
Living Perception In Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mary Mclevey
Living Perception In Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mary Mclevey
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis examines the philosophical underpinnings of the possibility to perceive in different ways, with a particular attention to Merleau-Ponty's account of perception as inseparable from the wider arc of a person's embodied existence. Chapter 1 reflects on the relationship between Merleau-Ponty's description of the co-existence of the senses, and concrete ways that individual perceivers co-exist. Chapter 2 brings Merleau-Ponty's account of perception as a field of lived relationships, into conversation with the contingency of perceptual limits. Chapter 3 examines the significance of Merleau-Ponty's attention to experiences of synaesthesia and proposes concrete ways that a perceiver might move to shift …
Representationalism About Sensory Phenomenology, Matthew Ivanowich
Representationalism About Sensory Phenomenology, Matthew Ivanowich
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation examines representationalism about sensory phenomenology—the claim that for a sensory experience to have a particular phenomenal character is a matter of it having a particular representational content. I focus on a particular issue that is central to representationalism: whether reductive versions of the theory should be internalist or externalist. My primary goals are (i) to demonstrate that externalist representationalism fails to provide a reductive explanation for phenomenal qualities, and (ii) to present a reductive internalist version of representationalism that utilizes the empirical framework of psychophysics and neuroscience to develop a philosophical theory of content. The bulk …
For The Good Of The Thing, Sarah Louise Kristine Warren
For The Good Of The Thing, Sarah Louise Kristine Warren
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
What is to be done about the thing? There is a growing interest in contemporary philosophy in re-considering the ontological status of the object – traditionally considered the passive substrate of human experience. This paper argues that, if we treat the object qua object seriously as an area of inquiry and attempt to accord it – à la Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter – a certain amount of agency, we can come to see it as both unique in its capacities and more than superficially enabling of subjective cognition. By using Jane Bennett’s aforementioned text, Clark and Chalmers’ extended mind theory, …
Space, Territory, Occupy: Towards A Non-Phenomenological Dwelling, Brett Mommersteeg
Space, Territory, Occupy: Towards A Non-Phenomenological Dwelling, Brett Mommersteeg
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis analyzes the relationship between the body and space through the works of Henri Lefebvre, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The aim of the project is to move beyond Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, which relies on a phenomenological understanding of the body and space. In order to do so, it will find in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘territory’ a non-phenomenological and constructivist concept of space that does not posit the ‘lived body’ as a transcendent ground. As a result, it will also attempt to trace out a non-phenomenological concept of ‘dwelling’ that is not …
Experiencing Nothing: Anxiety And The Philosophy Of Alain Badiou, William E. Rankin Iv
Experiencing Nothing: Anxiety And The Philosophy Of Alain Badiou, William E. Rankin Iv
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis proposes to supplement the philosophy of Alain Badiou with an existentialist account of anxiety. After identifying a “phenomenological deficit” in Badiou’s thought, I argue that Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre provide the conceptual resources for theorizing the affective emergence of subjectivity from within the confines of a determinant situation. My contention, simply, is that anxiety is a rare and unsettling experience of nothing that makes apparent the underlying contingency of all situations, thereby prompting new modes of subjective behavior. In this sense, I treat anxiety as the in-situation experience of an event that may occasion the transition from a …
Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus
Metaphor And Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer And Cognitive Transformation In British And Irish Modernism, Andrew C. Wenaus
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify as New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the effects Modernist texts have “above” the page: lived experience. I examine the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Identifying the human mind as linguistic and language as an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a self-representational knot between text and mind that constitutes lived experience. Far from being an abstraction, psycho-ecology is concrete: …
Shame And The Sharing Of Existence, Noel A. Glover
Shame And The Sharing Of Existence, Noel A. Glover
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Abstract: Our aim with this project is to re-animate shame, to argue that there are in fact two kinds of shame experience. The first, primary shame, refers to the exposure of the self by the primordial other, a moment prior to the interpolation of judgment and morality in which the self apprehends its object state before the other, fixed within its gaze. Primary shame is the revelation that I am insofar as the other sees me. Secondary shame, on the other hand, is the mobilization within the pale of society of this originary exhibition of self. Secondary shame is …