Philosophy Commons^™

Grieving And Attentiveness: Perception As Flourishing In Ocean Vuong And Mary Oliver, Madison Smith

Papers

The paper argues that poets Ocean Vuong and Mary Oliver treat grief as something formative to one's life and character rather than purely destructive; through their suffering, the subject has the opportunity to cultivate a sense of attentiveness that transforms perceptions of the self, others, history, and the natural world.

This project was an output for The Belmont Formation Scholars Cohort for Character Research and Writing, which received generous support funding from The Kern Family Foundation.

I gratefully acknowledge peer review feedback on this project, and I am accountable for writing of this product without generative AI and in alignment …

A Poetic Call For And A Reflection And Commentary On Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, And Compassion, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Finding a published poem I had written as a teenager, titled “The Heavens Weep.” this article uses that poem as the basis for a commentary that reflects on the state of the world today (2026),  As a commentary, the article uses the poetic and metaphoric words in the poem as a relevant "reality check" for what is still going on today.  In essence, the commentary is about a call for Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, and Compassion, or what I call Archetypal Energies, Higher Vibrational Energies that operate deep within our individual and collective psyches to creatively urge us to "see" …

A Comparative Critique Of Masculine Domination In Madame Bovary (1856) And Gemma Bovery (1999), Aqeela Hamarthya Czecheska Humayra, Diah Kartini Lasman

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study examines how social construction influences the representation of female autonomy through the transition of medium and temporal context. Its primary focus is to compare the mechanisms of masculine domination in Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel Madame Bovary (1856) with Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel adaptation Gemma Bovery (1999). Utilizing Hutcheon’s adaptation theory (2013) and de Beauvoir’s existential feminism (1949), complemented by Freytag’s dramatic structure analysis (1900) as the main framework, this research proceeds from the premise that the transposition from text to visual medium has significant implications for changes in narrative strategies and plot. This study highlights the differing manifestations …

Brains And Hearts: Virginia Woolf’S Natural, Incomparable Care In Mrs. Dalloway, Olivia L. Landgraf

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper offers an ecofeminist reading of Mrs. Dalloway that centers vulnerability as a unifying ethical concept through which Virginia Woolf interrogates care, selfhood, and the human relationship to the natural world. While existing scholarship has examined Woolf’s use of nature in relation to aging, loss, trauma, and sexuality, I argue that these themes are bound together by a shared condition of ontological vulnerability. Drawing on ecofeminist theory and care ethics, the paper contends that Woolf challenges inherited Cartesian dualisms that separate rationality from nature and mind from body, revealing how such separations distort ethical perception and impede care.

Through …

Towards The Publisher-Function Of The Independent Press: Authorship And Experimentation In The Semiotext(E) Oeuvre, Gilbert Aguirre

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This project is a contribution to debates on authorship, expanding Foucault’s theorization of the author as a function of discourse into the field of creative production by proposing my theory of the publisher-function. Here, I highlight the role of the publisher in shaping literary discourse using avant-garde publishing house Semiotext(e). I analyze two experimental publications to illustrate how this publisher’s role in editing and curating their booklist—or, as I propose we call it, their oeuvre—compounds with the fact of publication to create a new kind of authorial role. This is done through emphasizing the paratexts, elements of design, and literary …

Bergsonian Blend: Subjective Temporality Within Modernist Aesthetics Of Mental Illness, Lydia Victoria Gervais

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Henri Bergson was a modernist French philosopher who wrote extensively on the topic of the lived experience of time, which he called durée, or duration. His contemporary, Sigmund Freud, was developing psychoanalytic theory in a growing field of psychological study, which serves as a prominent ancestor to modern psychiatry and current psychoanalytical literary studies. Fiction writers of the 1900s absorbed the zeitgeist of melded chronology and consciousness, interweaving themes of time and trauma in their works. Utilizing Henri Bergson’s durée as a philosophical framework, I examine the moralization of time-consciousness in connection with mental illness and investigate representations of …

Awe As Signpost: An Argument For The Consistency Of Lewis’S “Joy” And Psychological Awe, Audrey Hendricks

Senior Honors Theses

C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy details Lewis’s autobiographical apologetic for the existence of God through his experiences of “Joy,” a technical term invented by Lewis. Upon close study, his experiences of Joy contain many similarities to psychological awe. This investigation compares Lewis’s Joy with psychological awe using the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S) to determine consistency. Lewis’s Joy was found to be consistent with all six criteria of the AWE-S in addition to other recognized psychological characteristics of awe. In addition to qualitative consistency, this review also argues for the teleological consistency of the two concepts, contending for a Christian teleological …

Volume 17, Christian O’Neill, Kyara Greene, Savva Sidorov, Laura Bisaillon, Luke Clemmer, Hannah Gordon, Kitt Benson, Taylor Blount, Rachel Danzitz, Nicholas Duellman, Chase Gionis, Hima Fernando, Seth Franzyshen, Onyx Gonzalez, Bryan Lin, Samantha Start, Ysabel Wells, Maggie Duncan

Incite: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Introduction Dr. Amorette Barber, Director, Office of Student Research

From the Editor Dr. Hannah Dudley-Shotwell

Cover Artist’s Statement Maggie Duncan

On Mentoring Dr. Yulia Uryadova

Ukrainian Resistance in the Face of Russification: Nestor Makhno and Anarchism

by Christian O’Neill

Life Vest by Kyara Greene

Isolation and 16S rRNA Identification of Bacteria from Fire Department Connection Pipe by Savva Sidorov

The Effectiveness of Planned Exercise in Reducing ADHD Symptoms in Children by Laura Bisaillon & Luke Clemmer

Linguistic Analysis on Confidence and Communication Strategies with Disparities Between Sign Fluency and Hearing Impairment by Hannah Gordon

Freedmen in Indian Territory by Kitt …

“Under The Fig-Tree”: Post-Revolutionary Literature Influences American Government, Clara Kernodle

Honors Theses

The literary context of post-Revolutionary America developed a broad sense of the American character as virtuous, hardworking, and responsible. In the 1780s, three American writers, representing these three categories of literature, penned their perspectives on human character and society, to much commercial success. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Royall Tyler, and Philip Freneau described their situations and opinions with candor and wit, helped spark a broad sense of the American character, and influenced the authors of the nation’s founding documents. At the end of that same decade, Anti-Federalist political philosophy drew from an established literary conception of the American …

The Fantasy Of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia And The Recovery Of Creation By Robert J. Dobie, Hayden Bilbrey

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

A chapter by chapter review of Robert J. Dobie's 2024 book The Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien: Mythopoeia and the Recovery of Creation. The review gives a chapter by chapter breakdown and asserts that though the book is more likely for academics, its approachable coverage of Tolkien's work and philosophical ideas also makes it a great read for anyone who is a fan of Middle-earth.

Tolkien’S Thomist Triad: A High Medieval Response To Contemporary Jus Ad Bellum, Jeffrey S. Dixon

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This paper reviews the development of the component of just war theory dealing with whether it is just to wage a war in the first place (jus ad bellum) from the early medieval to early modern eras and compares its principles to J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels about Middle-Earth. Tolkien’s views on the concept of jus ad bellum can be dated to a specific point in the medieval era, just before a number of modern, consequentialist criteria were added to Catholic thought on just war. I conclude that Tolkien’s fictional works permit broader justifications for war than do most modern just war …

What Common Themes Are Challengers Trying To Silence And What Would Be Lost Without Them?, Corrine H. Martello

Richard T. Schellhase Essay Prize in Ethics

This research paper aims to analyze the controversies surrounding The Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, three commonly challenged books that are often found in high school English classes, in order to answer the question “what themes in these books are challengers trying to silence, and what would be lost without them?”. It will be broken into four sections, Alienation, Mental Health Struggles & Trauma, The Loss of Innocence, and Exploring Identity, which are common themes presented in all three books. …

Exploring Two Approaches Towards Gender Inclusive Language In The Philippines, Eduardo Victor J. Valdez

Marketing and Law Faculty Publications

In this paper, we shall take a look at the role of the Philippine government in encouraging the use of gender-neutral Philippine-English. We shall also glimpse at Philippine gayspeak as a player in the development of the Filipino language game. We endeavor to learn if a top to bottom program for language inclusivity from the government down to the citizenry is effective in promoting inclusivity in Philippine-English. On the other hand, a minority to majority development was the route that Philippine gayspeak took in adding their form of life into the gender-neutral Filipino language.

Humanity Is Evolving Its Consciousness: The Role Of Archetypal Energies As Guides During An Unfolding Weeding Out And Alignment Process, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Humanity is evolving its consciousness at individual and collective levels.  Given these seemingly tumultuous times, as of this writing (January 2026), to make such a statement may sound like a strange thing to say.  However, I suggest that if you are alive today and if you are reading these words, these are the very times for which you were born—to assist Humanity as it evolves its consciousness with your unique gifts, whatever they may be.  That is, this period of our individual and collective human being-ness may be characterized as an unfolding period of weeding out and alignment with the …

Bridging Fantasy And Identity Through Narrative, Washington C. Pearce

New Jersey English Journal

In this personal essay I explore the connection between fantastical literacy and a student's perception of their own identity. As we explore fantastical narrative worlds, we learn the vocabulary to describe our own lives and write our own life-stories.

Natureculture: Interdisciplinary Ecologies And Place-Based Writing For Student Success, Kerry Neville, Hedwig Fraunhofer

Academic Affairs

The NatureCulture collaborative study abroad course represents a central outcome of the Collaborative Research Grant and has undergone substantial conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical development. While finalization of a site-specific itinerary has been delayed due to unanticipated challenges in securing a stable and academically viable location, the collaborative course itself is fully designed and pedagogically complete. Grounded in interdisciplinary, team-taught instruction, the NatureCulture model integrates environmental humanities, creative writing, intercultural learning, and eco-pedagogy to foster place-based, experiential, and critically reflective learning. Within this framework, faculty have developed complementary courses that collectively serve students across multiple stages of the curriculum.

Dr. Neville’s …

Voice And Student Engagement With Writing: Integrating Perspective, Personality, And Style, Sara S. Martin

English Dissertations

The rise of generative AI has many teachers worried about the future of writing classes and students’ desire to learn. However, instructors can motivate students to write by valuing what AI can never replace: their voices. Previous definitions of voice took the concept for granted and left it either vague or reductive, unhelpful for structured lessons. I propose a new, more teachable definition of voice as perspective, personality, and style. Perspective takes priority because it belongs solely to the individual and the unrepeatable moment of composition. Personality infuses passages with emotion, forming a bond between author and reader. Style, the …

The Ache Of Modernism: Death, Affect, And Intersubjectivity In Twentieth-Century American Literature, Alex Gergely

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation suggests that we can locate, describe, and experience death as an aesthetic mood called the ache of modernism. The ache is an atmosphere found in twentieth-century literature that goes beyond simply “positive” or “negative” feeling and encourages audiences to come to an affective and existential relationship with their mortality. As an intersubjective mood deriving from an attunement on death, it illuminates the historical and philosophical moment of many twentieth-century authors while clarifying their texts’ continued resonance today. This project therefore draws on the thought of major philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, …

To Print A Remake: An Analysis Of Hollywood Remakes And Their Cultural Value, Connor F. Seaton

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In recent years, audiences and movie critics have expressed concern that Hollywood’s growing reliance on remakes, sequels, franchises, and similar adaptations has led to a broader worry that originality is fading from modern cinema and that the industry is instead focused on using adaptations to maximize profits. Although adaptation is often seen as a commercially driven framework for reproducing existing intellectual property in a new media format, this thesis argues that it should be recognized as an autonomous cultural category with its own artistic, historical, and social significance and merit. By analyzing adaptation scholarship and reviewing its complex historical development, …

Just War Theory In The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins’S Critique Of Violence, Power, And Rebellion, Laila Hannum

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis applies just war theory to Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy, arguing that while the districts' rebellion satisfies the principles of jus ad bellum (justice in going to war), it systematically violates jus in bello (justice in the conduct of war) and jus post bellum (justice after war), and ultimately replicates the oppressive structures of the Capitol it sought to overthrow.

Drawing primarily on Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars and on Brian Orend's ideas on post-war justice, this thesis traces the rebellion's moral arc across all three novels. Chapter One shows that the rebellion meets the criteria …

Human Evil (In The Weird), Lucas Ethridge

University Honors Theses

This paper examines a trending doom in speculative fiction: the post-human age. Many modern works have started to look past human civilization as humans surrender all hope and faith in a climate-doomed world. Honing in on core concepts in Weird fiction, this paper explores human merit through Old and New Weird. A good part spends time establishing the canon, looking at similar patterns across age, philosophy, war and genre. The chief question asks if humankind was ever worth saving.

“War Is God” And “Unguessed Kinships”: Blood Meridian And Cormac Mccarthy’S “Border Tetralogy”, Seth Reeves

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis applies the metaphysics of philosopher Gilles Deleuze to Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, arguing that the novel initiates a thread of immanent subjectivity that unfolds throughout the Border Trilogy that follows it. Against a hierarchical metaphysics of transcendence, specifically an inverted Platonic Idealism, Blood Meridian dramatizes an immanent world of “optical democracy,” a prose style that levels the human and nonhuman and eludes subject and object categories. The kid’s autonomy from Judge Holden’s violent domination marks the truncated beginning of a Deleuzian subjectivity of becoming-other and immanent kinship. This incomplete gesture continues in the Border Trilogy, where …

From Sensibility To Critical Engagement: Sympathy, Animality, And Subjecthood In Wollstonecraft’S Maria And Vindication, Yingnan Shang

Comparative Woman

This paper examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s strategic use of sentimental animal tropes alongside rationalist critique in Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), arguing that she mobilizes sensibility not as an end in itself, but as a pedagogical instrument within a broader project of aesthetic education—one intended to move readers from affective sympathy toward political and philosophical judgment. Focusing in particular on animal metaphors—especially in the character of Jemima, who repeatedly figures herself as a domesticated and brutalized creature—I trace how Wollstonecraft employs tropes of animality to illuminate the processes by which …

Lothlórien: Gendered Spaces, Cartographic Nominalism, And Galadriel’S Queerness, Bo Kampmann Walther

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien’s portrayal of Lothlórien is layered with complexities that reflect broader tensions between the feminine landscape and the masculine impulse to understand, name, and rationalize the world. This article examines the ‘fight’ over Lothlórien and its entitlement to truth from both female and male perspectives. It combines a close reading of passages from The Fellowship of the Ring with theories of name-giving, power, and mapping. The article concludes by evaluating these insights through the lens of Kristeva’s concept of the “abject” and discussing what ‘queer’ might mean in the Tolkien oeuvre.

“Pride And Despair”: Denethor’S Struggles Against His Self-Woven Death, Ali Mirzabayati

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper examines Denethor, Steward of Gondor, as a central figure illustrating the interplay of pride, fear, and mortality in The Lord of the Rings. It analyzes how his Númenórean heritage, grief over the loss of his sons, and obsession with control shape his decisions, leading to passivity, mistrust, and self-destruction. Drawing on Northern literary traditions, including the Danes’ prayers to the Gastbona in Beowulf and Boethian reflections on pride and despair, the study situates Denethor’s downfall within a broader cultural and philosophical context. By exploring how his fear of death undermines judgment and heroic potential, the paper highlights …

Love Amid The Rage: Feminist Affect In Women's Life-Writing, Genesis Siverio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis is to show the ways women’s emotions or affect, particularly rage and love, are described by women writers in their most intimate stories. I discuss the way emotion has been demeaned, and how feminist scholars have instead viewed the body as a place of insight, reclaiming a knowledge from the senses. In the midst of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, women give voice to their affectual experiences and cultivate the feelings they have so often been denied. Focusing on the particular ways women’s anger manifests in their lives and in their bodies, I zoom in on …

The Substance Of Reality: Moral Perfectionism In Shakespeare's Hamlet., David Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a selection of and close reading of key passages, I offer an interpretation of Hamlet that seeks to illuminate the play as an important work of moral philosophy, and to situate the play within a strand of moral philosophy named moral perfectionism by Stanley Cavell. Indeed, Hamlet is a masterpiece of Renaissance drama, but when read with attention to moral perfectionism, the play yields additional layers of meaning. Hamlet is a “philosophical drama” that navigates the “moral calling of philosophy”—a text that seems to, almost uncannily, elicit the audience to think reflectively, to ask fundamental human questions along …

The Communal Lyric: Poetry In Devotional And Oppressed Communities, Michael N. Yacoub

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the interaction between lyric and community; it asks what a communal lyric is, how it functions, and to what ends. In Chapter One, I compare Jonathan Culler’s performative model of lyric with the theory of Takhyīl as expounded by Arab philosopher-critics al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Qartajanni to argue that a communal lyric is a form of audience-oriented public discourse distinguished by formal features that prompt the poem’s (re-)iteration and establish an interpersonal relationship with the audience in order to influence them and make shareable value claims about the world. In Chapters Two and Three I provide close-reading …

How To Walk On Water: Living Through The Absurd, Esther Du

Masters Theses

Set in a speculative world submerged by water, this thesis constructs a fragmented, nonlinear narrative that reflects on survival, memory, and displacement in the aftermath of catastrophe. Through three interwoven chapters—The Outcast, The Researcher, and The World—the project explores the emotional and psychological landscapes of individuals navigating a post-apocalyptic existence where the past is irretrievable and the future uncertain. Using an interdisciplinary form of visual storytelling, writing, and sound, the work draws from personal experience and collective trauma to examine how people reconstruct identity and meaning after loss. Rather than offering a definitive answer to existential …

Perceiving The Perceiver: “Viewing” Sauron Through The Gestalt Theory Of Perception, Cameron Bourquein

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper uses Gestalt theory, the Gestalt laws of perception, and the reception theory of Wolfgang Iser to elucidate the character “Sauron” as he appears in The Lord of the Rings, The Rings of Power, and Tolkien’s wider legendarium. It argues firstly that Sauron’s high degree of indeterminacy and ambiguity suggests he can be read as a gestalt entity, one the reader creates by mentally constructing a whole from (seemingly) disparate parts. Building on the semiotics work of Nagy (2013), it argues that Sauron in The Lord of the Rings can be read as gestalt across the spatial, …