Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nietzsche’S Will To Power As That Which Eternally Recurs, Joshua Aaron Ackerman

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Commonly believed to be a thought experiment to help us with life affirmation, a cosmological or metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence seems to be gaining ground. I argue for a metaphysical reading of the eternal recurrence. In arguing for this position, I hold that Nietzsche’s view of the eternal recurrence can be traced back to his admiration for the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. Specifically, I think Nietzsche draws on a few of Heraclitus’ cosmological doctrines which include continuous flux, a unity of opposites, and eternal strife. In Nietzsche adopting Heraclitus’ cosmological standpoints, my view is that Nietzsche’s Will to Power …

Bad Actors, Wendell Ward

English Theses & Dissertations

This manuscript contains a collection of short stories. It also includes the first several chapters of a novella. Within are characters who act and suffer consequences without the imposition of supernatural elements to affect outcomes, which is hopefully what makes them seem “real.” But then there are ambiguities and archetypes and symbolic imagery dancing around the edges of their predicaments, too. Think flambéed Flaubert with the saltiness of Hemingway and the peppery tang of Woolf complimented with a sugary pinch of Charlotte Bronte to bring out the flavor of the tomatoes, poured over with a rich, Jungian gravy. If this …

The Plague: A Contemporary Lens, Khawaja Ahmed, Delaney Collier, Will Plumb

Student Research

The Plague by Albert Camus bears witness to the town of Oran amidst the spread of the plague from the beginning to the end of the quarantine placed on the town. Although it is a direct comparison to the COVID-19 pandemic, Camus’s themes expressed in his novel resonates with other contemporary worldly issues that may or may not have an explanation. These other contemporary issues include war and the climate crisis. From our 2022 perspective, we have seen the COVID pandemic play out firsthand. We have witnessed from afar the threat of World War III and the current war in …

Understanding Appalachian Deaths Of Despair Through A Perspective Of Marxism And Intersectionality, Mackenzie Boughner

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Uneducated working-class individuals in the United States are dying from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholic-related liver disease at unprecedented rates; a phenomenon economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton describe as deaths of despair. This paper focuses on deaths of despair in the Appalachian region, where mortality rates from these types of deaths are disproportionately higher than the rest of the country. Marxism and intersectionality are two philosophical frameworks that I will apply to Appalachian despair to test the adequacy of their explanatory power. By placing Marxism and intersectionality in the context of the data surrounding deaths of despair, I can …

Medical Ethics: From The Perspective Of Undergraduate Pre-Health Students, Hannah Im

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

The burden of ethical decision-making is a significant contributor to compassion fatigue in healthcare professionals. Due to the impact of moral conflicts, it may be beneficial to reassess the effectiveness of current ethics education and training. While previous studies have surveyed a range of medical professionals and students, it remains unclear if exposure to ethics topics during undergraduate education could better prepare future healthcare workers. Thus, there is a need to identify the necessity of introducing ethics courses into the required pre-health curriculum. The following study took the first step to gauge this by surveying undergraduate pre-health students on their …

Postmarked 2022, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

Postmarked was a publication started during the COVID-19 pandemic by three RISD architecture students. The first issue has the theme of "sonder" and contains student writing and artwork on postcards that deal with this theme.

Speech Acts As Contingent Encounters: Realizing Agency In Contaminated Worlds, Zachary Cross

Honors Theses

Agency is realized in the act of speaking, an act which is always contingent on a collaborative process that transforms all parties involved. We think and act with one another and our concepts, there is no act of speech prior to encounter. In this paper I explore different ways which language shapes our thinking and play with those structures to use them as models for realizing agency. This exploration became personal insofar as exploring ways of thinking transformed my own sense of agency in the speech act. The completion of this paper is thus essential to its conclusion.

Being Creative: Not An Act But A Habit, Matthew William Smith

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

This project explores what it means to be creative, how to practice creativity, and how a creative practice can be used to bring about the change one wants to see in the world. Many theories and ideas from historical and modern scholars influenced the work. The literature review findings were synthesized to produce a practical and tangible creative practice prototype and a strategic action plan.

Betwixt & Between., Xuanyi Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I will discuss the process of learning, borrowing, and exploring the fusion between styles that emerged from the exchange of Eastern and Western civilizations. I will also use the process of transformation and merging of motifs to evoke my thoughts on the identity of immigrants. In addition, the essay will also discuss the similarities between traditional Chinese and Western designs metaphorically. This thesis will also explain why I use IUDs for pattern creation and provide views on the body ownership of women in the East and West. I will also consider the evolution and reflection of the …

Transformation., Jingshuo Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My works mainly show my perception of life and my change of thought. The world is full of changes, and the pandemic has disrupted our lives. Many people, including me, are confused about the world. Philosophy and my observation and thinking about the world helped me to have a clearer understanding of the world. My paintings Licia, Butterfly Woman, and Live with Covid reflect my understanding of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of empathy. Within my art, I also use another German Philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's theory of the culture industry to deepen my understanding of some social phenomena. My …

The Ethics Of Masking During A Pandemic, Mason Bennett

Philosophy Undergraduate Honors Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic has been disastrous, approaching a million deaths in the United States alone, and has demonstrated the world’s lack of preparation for a severe airborne virus. Countermeasures to infection are important to implement in order to lessen loss of life, but also must be justified and shown to be ethical. A countermeasure which is especially viable is wearing masks because of their high efficacy in preventing disease transmission compared to their relatively low restriction of liberty; studies have shown that mask wearing effectively impairs the spread of airborne pathogens and creates little physical or social harm. I argue …

Down The Misinformation Rabbit Hole: Falling Or Jumping In?, Alex Siebenmorgen

Philosophy Undergraduate Honors Theses

The primary goal of this paper is to determine in which cases, if any, an individual is culpable for adopting, expressing, or acting upon a misinformed belief. To determine this, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which individuals select beliefs and the biases or mistakes that lead them to adopt false ones. I will compare and evaluate the views of Neil Levy and Dan Kahan, who offer opposing viewpoints on the source of misinformed beliefs. I will also consider the attempts to model belief adoption and expression through signaling theory. Finally, I will propose a particular standard to …

Hannah Arendt And The Recreation Of The Public Space At The El Paso-Ciudad Juarez Border, Maximiliano Gutierrez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Arendt's philosophy is essentially phenomenological, especially her concept of the world of appearances in which everything manifests itself to human begins with those who share this space. Her phenomenological approach to philosophy enables us to shed light on the realm of public affairs, namely, being born, plurality, and specifically I argue, immigration. In this case I am referring to immigration in its most general meaning, that is, to the act of moving into another country and, thereby, leaving one's own private space in their former country. In order to best understand this phenomenological approach, it is necessary to understand Arendt's …

Climate Change: The Final Crisis Of Capital, Walker Daniel Peatross

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As the body of scientific research on climate change continues to grow it has become undeniable that we live in the midst of an ecological crisis; however, this leaves us with a myriad of secondary questions whose answers are more contentious. In this project, I use a mixture of Marxist and Phenomenological analysis to explore these uncertainties. In chapter one, I will detail Marx's description of capitalism both to demonstrate the inherent irrationality of the system and also to represent the ecological critique implicit in Marxist Theory. In chapter two, I will examine how the ideology of neoliberal political theory …

A Lesson In Mourning: The Evolution Of The English Anti-Elegy, K. Matthew Bennett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the evolution of the anti-elegy originating with Thomas Hardy’s elegiac sequence in memory of his wife Emma; Poems of 1912-1913. Using French post-structuralist Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share as a theoretical lens, Hardy’s anti-elegies are analyzed and rhetorically connected to English war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-elegies. Hardy’s anti-sentimentality, fatalistic outlook on death, and rejection of the Christian afterlife seeps into the language of Sassoon’s war poems which serve as a protest to the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism witnessed during the First World War. Hardy and Sassoon’s anti-elegies, with their hyper-focus on the elegized body, are …

Searching For Hades In Archaic Greek Literature, Daniel Stoll

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No single volume of mythological or philological research exists for Hades. In the one moment Hades appears in archaic Greek literature, speaking for only ten lines, Hermes stands nearby. Thus, to understand and journey to Hades is to reckon with Hermes’ close presence. As I synthesize research by writers from several different disciplines, may some light be brought into the depths. May we analyze Hades’ brief appearance in archaic Greek literature, examining how what I define as the “Hermetic” emits from his breath in the one moment he physically appears and speaks.

Early Intervention And Prediction Of Risk Management Issues In Law Enforcement: A Phenomenological Study, Pamela Lynn Smith

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to research the Early Intervention Systems (EIS) and prediction of risk management issues in law enforcement. The following questions guided the study:

1. How do law enforcement personnel describe their experience with EIS programs as an intervention for officers with behavioral or conduct issues?
2. How do EIS programs affect law enforcement agencies as a whole?
3. What indicators could law enforcement supervisors look for in officers to circumvent misconduct (on or off duty)?
4. What interventions have been observed personally or with other officers regarding discipline, counseling, additional training, etc.?

The setting for this study was …

Ecologies Of (Domestic) Trauma, Ecologies Of (Domestic) Violence: A Rhetorical Procession Toward Mourning, Charlotte E. Lucke

All Dissertations

In this dissertation, I posit that intimate partner violence is entrenched in an often-overlooked historical and rhetorical legacy of patriarchal cultural, structural, and direct violences. Many scholars in and outside of rhetorical studies have analyzed and critiqued public representations of trauma and violence, including intimate partner violence. Joining this conversation, I focus on the limitations in the ways influential rhetorical domains both represent and respond to people who abuse their intimate partners. Often, mass media represents people who abuse their intimate partners as individuals void of contexts. Similarly, the criminal justice system holds individuals responsible through law enforcement and incarceration. …

Poetic Justice: Connecting The Modern American Prosecutor To Her Rhetorical Roots, Michael Caves

All Dissertations

Poetic Justice: Connecting the Modern American Prosecutor to her Rhetorical Roots explores the gap between rhetoric and the American prosecutor, to eventually advocate for a more creative, inventive trial practice for prosecutors that embraces the spirit and methods of narrative, poetics, and Ulmeric mystories, with the prosecutor’s unique ethical obligations forming the basis of a new prosecutor’s rhetoric. This research opens with an autoethnographic account of the author’s own path to criminal prosecution, to give the reader a sense of the author’s ethos, to identify the shortcomings of rhetorical training in law school pedagogy, and to outline the rhetorical …

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes, Andrew Demczuk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Operatic Mysticisms: Mountains, Deserts, Waterscapes examines the ways we encounter environments as readers/viewers of operas, literature, film, and sound recordings, and how each medium requires different detail-gathering techniques. Respective to the previously mentioned mediums, Sun & Sea (2017), Mount Analogue (1952), El Mar La Mar (2017), and Energy Field (2010) are analyzed by engaging with environmental media studies and invention. Reflecting the nature of each landscape—summits of mountains, aporias of deserts, and mysteries of waterscapes—an elemental approach is taken in investigating how these spaces may be noticed, internalized, recorded, and traversed by both the artist and viewer. …

Collective, Vulnerable, Nascent (Post) Qualitative Inquiry-Writing, Catherine Thiele, Stephen Heimans, Catherine Manathunga, Suzanne Barry, Benjamin Cherry-Smith, Kristy Farrelly, Terry Grogan, Robyn Kemble, Lisa Mcilwain

The Qualitative Report

As a group of multidisciplinary postgraduate research students and teachers emerging as a “we,” we read, discussed, and then, without planning to do so, responded in writing to the textual provocations of three post qualitative texts. We picture ourselves as a “classing,” a “becoming class” (Meirieu, 2020, para. 1.). We are a study-group-thinking-writing experimentation; vulnerable, wobbling and joyously grappling to (re)shape (our) post qualitative inquiries. The experiment offered a scholarly place to critically, creatively, and softly curate post qualitative questions and wonderings. The writings below offer a lure into our nascent post-qualitative vulnerabilities. The purpose of this paper is to …

The Latin American Tragedy: A Qualitative Research Of How Culture, Media, And Gender Roles Lead To Femicide, Vanessa Gonzalez

Honors College Theses

This study aims to analyze how Latin American cultural values and popular media perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes that can subsequently contribute to the growing femicide rates happening across the region. Although violence against women is a global issue, Latin American femicide is characterized by cultural, systemic, and political factors that not only allow it to thrive but make it unique in a global context as it relates to the discussion around violence against women. Adherence to honor culture, gender-based stereotypes like that of machismo and marianismo, along with the overt sexualization of Latin women in popular media, create a domino …

Researcher-Participant Privilege: Confidentiality And Qualitative Criminology, Eric Michael

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Research institutions have the responsibility to comply with laws that govern the oversight of all research including research with human subjects. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) review research protocols and approve research based on the rights and safety of research subjects. When conducting qualitative criminological research, researchers must weigh ethical considerations around their methods. These methodological considerations are coupled with guiding ethical principles that are fundamental to human subject research. One major consideration regards breaking confidentiality which can bring about great risk to participants. The following thesis focuses on the ethics of researcher-participant privilege and issues that qualitative researchers have in …

Attention, Reflection, And Contemplation: Approaching The Divine Through Romantic Poiesis, Katelynn Tyner

English Undergraduate Honors Theses

Often the techniques of the said and the unsaid work together. This paper will explore ways in which poets embrace iconophilic or iconoclastic postures toward divine poiesis. One objective will be to focus on the arrangement of an abundance of images into itineraries and poetic landscapes. Another objective will be to demonstrate how these patterns of cultivation can be related to a divine poiesis. Through poetry, there are ways of attending to, reflecting on, and contemplating divine images that can return us to forms of participation with the sacred. First examining poetic attention, I identify poets who demonstrate …

Impact Of Mentoring On Epistemic Cognition Of Higher Education Administrators: A Modified Explanatory Mixed Methods Study, Robert Levrant

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In today’s complex workplace, organizations have implemented mentoring programs to serve the needs of employees by providing career development and personal support. Mentoring relationships provide a variety of vocational, psychosocial and role modeling functions to protégés. Previous educational psychology research has examined the role of mentoring as it relates to self-regulation, self-efficacy, career promotions, motivation and other constructs. Epistemic cognition relates to the understanding of the nature of knowledge and knowing. Epistemic cognition relates to the development, in which one’s understanding of knowledge evolves from a belief that knowledge is finite, must be passed down by expert authorities toward an …

Arguing For The Philosophy Of Political Science, Robert Herold

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

While there are many working scientists who engage in things like theory building and empirical testing, there has also been a group of scientists who sought to better understand the philosophy behind science. This philosophical study of science as a project is referred to as the philosophy of science and there are different sub-fields for each of the natural and social sciences, except for political science. This lack of an explicit sub-field dedicated to reflecting on our philosophy of science, i.e., our beliefs, values, methods, etc., has caused this knowledge to become tacit within our community. Because the knowledge of …

Becoming Stewards Of Attention: A Theological Appeal, Joshua Gorenflo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The widespread compromising of attention currently taking place in our digital age is, at least in part, a theological issue necessitating a theological response, which invites an examination of the human person in relation to God. Familiar within the biblical narrative and throughout Christian tradition, I suggest that when the role of steward functions as the operative paradigm for humans, the claims made upon their lives have profound implications for attending within the digital age. More specifically, the steward’s attention becomes a tangible expression of authority and accountability in representation of God’s image to the rest of creation. In pursuit …

Cognitive Tribalism: A Social Doxastic Model, Robert Ragsdale

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

How are facemasks – seemingly innocuous artifacts of the biomedical industry – currently embroiled in cultural wars? What motivates popular rejections of scientific consensus and messaging about the reality and consequences of anthropogenic climate change or the COVID-19 virus and vaccine? The puzzle is that (a) despite its being in everyone’s rational interests to have a well-informed public and body politic about collective threats, and (b) despite the public availability of accurate and reliable information, scientific messaging and public discourse surrounding climate change, COVID-19, and vaccine hesitancy, nevertheless, tend to be hijacked by political interest. Yet, if belief is essentially …

The Foundation Of A Grand Unified Metaphysics, Jason R. Miller

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Philosophers from Leibniz to Parfit have tackled the problem of existence and the problem of arbitrarity. I divide the solutions to these two problems into three general categories: (1) infinite regress answers, (2) ex nihilo answers, and (3) self-caused cause answers. I show that the first two (infinite regress and ex nihilo) categories of answers either fail to answer the problem of existence or the problem of arbitrarity or fail to satisfy one or more reasonable assumptions about said problems. Believing it to be useful to a self-caused cause answer to the problem of existence and the problem of arbitrarily, …

Konsep Manunggaling Kawula Gusti Dalam Lirik Lagu Sugih Tanpa Bandha Karya Sudjiwo Tejo, Muhammad Feraldy Naufal, Darmoko Darmoko

Multikultura

Manunggaling kawula Gusti adalah sebuah konsep dalam budaya Jawa yang diajarkan Syekh Siti Jenar, bahwa sejatinya Tuhan itu ada dalam diri manusia. Konsep ini menggambarkan berpadunya kawula (manusia) dengan Gusti (Tuhan). Sugih tanpa bandha adalah pemikiran Raden Mas Panji Sosrokartono, yang kemudian disajikan dan dipopulerkan melalui sebuah tembang oleh Sudjiwo Tejo. Artikel ini mengkaji konsep manunggaling kawula Gusti dalam lirik lagu tersebut. Penelitian dilakukan dengan analisis interpretatif pada lirik lagu dan dalam kerangka konsep etika (filsafat moral) dari Franz Magnis Suseno. Hasil pembahasan dapat dirumuskan bahwa syair lagu Sugih Tanpa Bandha memiliki keterkaitan dengan tahapan-tahapan untuk mencapai kemanunggalan (berpadunya pribadi …