Philosophy Commons^™

“Whither Then I Cannot Say”: Epistemological Uncertainty And Tolkien’S Transnational Myth, Mitchell Kooh

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

[Introduction To] Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism And Colonial Entanglements, Julietta Singh

Bookshelf

In Unthinking Mastery Julietta Singh challenges a core, fraught dimension of geopolitical, cultural, and scholarly endeavor: the drive toward mastery over the self and others. Drawing on postcolonial theory, queer theory, new materialism, and animal studies, Singh traces how pervasive the concept of mastery has been to modern politics and anticolonial movements. She juxtaposes destructive uses of mastery, such as the colonial domination of bodies, against more laudable forms, such as intellectual and linguistic mastery, to underscore how the concept—regardless of its use—is rooted in histories of violence and the wielding of power. For anticolonial thinkers like Fanon and Gandhi, …

Disarming “Nature” As A Weapon: A Queer Ecosemiotic Reimagining Of Futurity And Environmental Ethics Through Memoir, Sam Lauer

Master’s Theses

In this thesis, I posit that the need for an active, conscious, and radical queering of ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory has arisen in light of the postmodern problematization of “nature” and the “natural,” along with the queerness of society, culture, and science. The way we understand “nature” (in life and in texts), whether of physical environments, inherent selfhood, or normalcy, begs to be appropriately informed by discourses and realities of queerness in order for both social and environmental healing to take place. I have analyzed three works of queer creative nonfiction—memoirs—to illuminate the ways in which the …

Ideology In Literature And Literature As Ideology: Totalitarian And Reactionary Appropriation Of Resistant Texts, Huntley Hughes

Master’s Theses

This thesis seeks to explore the means by which nominally or potentially resistant texts are appropriated into violent or exploitative political structures for propaganda and profit. In the first chapter two pre-soviet Russian novels closely associated with the radical tradition are examined, through the lens of literary analysis, in order to uncover the ways in which ideologically egalitarian revolutionary movements can degenerate into authoritarian regimes. The second chapter is concerned with a Welsh text, How Green Was My Valley, which, despite being concerned with the conditions of the Welsh mining class, utilizes the narrative form of childhood recollection to insidiously …

Creator And Creation: Artistic Development In Herman Melville’S Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities And James Joyce’S A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Magdalena M. De La Cruz

Dissertations and Theses

This study focuses on the primary protagonists of Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Pierre Glendinning and Stephen Dedalus, as well as Isabel Banford, a supporting character in Melville’s novel, to illustrate how the tensions of contemporary society have a direct influence on the artist-hero’s representations and perspectives on self-realization. This thesis will draw on the major concepts of the artist and artist fiction as put forth in Otto Rank’s Art and Artist (1916), Herbert Marcuse’s “Der Deutsche Künstlerroman” (“The German Artist Novel”, 1922), and Maurice …

An Introduction To Psychological Aphistemalgia, Justin Manning

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

Virtual Queerness: Resisting Heteronormativity In Online Spaces, Denise Springett

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Brittney Payer, Kristen Shorer

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.

An Exploratory Study Of The Five-Factor Personality Traits Model As Predictors Among Women In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics Fields At Indiana State University, Sowmya Challa

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to identify any trends in personality traits of students at a mid-western university along with the influence of gender, choice of STEM or non-STEM academic major, and level of education on personality traits. The chosen mid-western university is Indiana State University (ISU) located in Terre Haute, Indiana. This study investigated the personality traits of student’s through administering Goldberg’s (1999) International Personality Item Pool of the Big Five Broad Domains of Personality. The personality profiles of students at ISU who have taken the questionnare are summarized. The personality profiles of female students were analyzed further …

The Effects Of Secondary School Accountability Grades On College And University Transfer, Jill Robinson Kramer

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Workforce projections indicate that a majority of jobs to be created in the U.S. economy will require some form of postsecondary education (Cappelli, 2015; Carnevale, Smith, & Strohl, 2010). At the same time, colleges and universities are being held accountable for completion and graduation of their students (The Commission, 2014) and secondary schools are being graded under changing accountability systems (Center for Education Policy, 2008; Dee & Jacobs, 2011, Figlio & Ladd, 2008). This study looked at the longer-term implications of high school accountability grades, A–F, and the impact on student transfer, associate’s degree completion, and time to associate’s degree …

Adult Learning And The Effect Of Education And Gender Interaction On Type 2 Diabetics, Abdi H. Nur

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this mixed methods research study was to investigate whether the relationships between education and medication and healthy exercise adherence were the same among female and male Type 2 diabetic adult learners. The purpose included also exploring whether registered nurses would alter their approach to diabetic adult learners’ education on medication and healthy exercise adherence considering patients’ gender and education levels. The study also investigated the correlation between diabetes duration and medication and healthy exercise adherence. The research investigation employed mixed methods sequential explanatory design using qualitative data to help explain the quantitative findings. The quantitative study was …

An Investigation Of Principal Leadership Behaviors And Implementation Of Adult Learning Strategies On The Professional Learning Environment Of A K-12 School, Christina Larson

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the influence of principal leadership behaviors and potential of utilizing adult learning strategies on the development of a school’s professional learning environment (PLE). The intention was also to determine if principals considered themselves prepared to develop and sustain such an environment. Research shows that principals and teachers perceive professional development needs and results differently. To obtain perspective from both groups, two separate surveys were administered. The results from this dissertation came from 262 principals and 433 teachers employed in K-12 public schools in Indiana. With the survey completed by principals, the …

I Am Commanded To Love You: The Journey Of Three Women College Presidents, Carey Monroe

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This was a phenomenological study of the lived experiences of women who serve as college presidents. Three women, who serve as current college presidents, participated in this study. The first was a president at a two-year community college in the upper Midwest for twelve years and served as president in another Midwestern community college for nine years prior. The second woman was a first-time president who had served for three years at a Catholic four-year college established to provide nurses for a health system. The third was a first-time president who served at a Research I institution in the upper …

Effect Of Directed Study Of Mathematics Vocabulary On Standardized Mathematics Assessment Questions, Adel Marlane Waite

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The problems under investigation included (a) Did a directed study of mathematics vocabulary significantly affect student performance levels on standardized mathematical questions? and (b) Did the strategies used in this study significantly affect student performance levels on standardized mathematical questions? The population consisted of eighth-grade pre-algebra students from two different middle schools in southern Indiana. This quasi-experimental study was of a quantitative, repeated-measures design, using a population of approximately 140 eighth-grade students with a control sample of 37 and an experimental sample of 52. I performed a repeated measures ANCOVA to analyze scores from a mathematics vocabulary posttest for each …

African American High School Students’ Perceptions Of Their College Counseling Experience, Latonya M. Turner

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study looked at high school African American students’ perceptions of their college counseling experiences. Much research has been done to highlight the views and/or perceptions of various stakeholders regarding college counseling with respect to African American students (Cabrera & La Nasa, 2000; Hossler & Stage, 1992; Ng, Wolf-Wendel, & Lomardi, 2014). A few examples of stakeholders are administrators, teachers, parents or guardians, and college-going organizations. However, little research exists on the views and or perceptions of college counseling from the student’s perspective (Howard, 2003). Knowing the perceptions of students provides a better understanding of how African American students in …

Distributed Computing In Internet Of Things (Iot) Using Mobile Ad Hoc Network (Manet): A Swarm Intelligence Based Approach, John Selvadurai

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing technological trend, which is expected to revolutionize the world by changing the way we do things. IoT is a concept that encourages all the electronic devices to connect to the internet and interact with each other. By connecting all these devices to the internet, new markets can be created, productivity can be improved, operating costs can be reduced and many other benefits can be obtained. In IoT architecture, often sensors and aggregators collect data and send to a cloud server for analyzing via the traditional cloud-server model. This client-server architecture is not adequate …

Relationship Between Athletic Identity And Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy Among Korean Collegiate Student Athletes, Jong Joo Moon

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explored barriers that Korean collegiate student athletes confront with regard to pursuing careers outside of professional athletics. More specifically, the purpose of the study was to identify the barriers to Korean student athletes’ career development, as well as to examine the relationships among the psychological constructs of athlete identity and career decision making self-efficacy. A total of 321 Korean student athletes participated in the study, including 263 men (81.9%) and 59 women (18.1%). Participants completed demographic information along with a parental influence questionnaire, the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale, Career Decision Making Self-Efficacy Scale Short Form, and two open-ended …

Andy's Inner Society: Warhol's Philosophy And Sense Of Self, Amyjoy V. Sedberry

The Catalyst

Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is an intimate look at the internal world of the painter and graphic artist. The general public often assumes that Warhol’s life was little more than a whirlwind of success and partying. His Philosophy conflicts with the general presuppositions about who Andy Warhol was. It reads like a diary and is rich with disclosures of his beliefs about love, beauty, success and underwear. Despite the intimate nature of these subjects and the apparently candid delivery of Warhol’s philosophies and life experiences, he maintains a cagey and detached voice throughout. I argue that his …

Involute Analysis: Virtual Discourse, Memory Systems And Archive In The Involutes Of Thomas De Quincey, Kimberley A. Garcia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Thomas De Quincey’s involutes inform metaphysical thought on memory and language, particularly concerning multiplicity and the virtual, repetition and difference. When co-opting the mathematic and mechanic involute in Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey generates an interdisciplinary matrix for the semiotics underpinning his philosophy of language and theory of memory and experience. Involutes entangle and reproduce. De Quincey’s involute exposes the concrete and actual through which all experience accesses the abstract or virtual. The materiality of their informatics and technics provides a literary model and theoretical precursor to a combination of archive and systems theory. The textuality of involute system(s)—both …

Ecologies Of Embodied Minds Embedded: Radical Romantic Perspectives On Architectures Of Technology, Sharmaine Browne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Romantic responses to the role of architectural technologies in the development of material being, consciousness, and culture by applying a critical approach in which I combine radical embodied cognitive theory, ecocritical perspectives, and a phenomenological lens to select Romantic texts written from 1789 to 1884 in response to industrial modernity. While scholarship has thoroughly explored technology as a cultural force which inevitably shapes consciousness, I propose that a slight shift of emphasis from technology’s external influence to the material internalization of its influence allows for new perspectives—particularly in light of recent proposals in cognitive philosophy which assert …

Course Syllabus (Su17) Coli 331: “‘World-Traveling’: Alterity And Liminality In Spike Lee’S Do The Right Thing And Amiri Baraka’S Dutchman”, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

This semester, we’ll view Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing and Shirley Knight’s 1966 cinematic production of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman through the critical lenses of Maria Lugones’ notions of ‘worlds’ and ‘world-traveling,’[1] which she develops in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Our task is to analyze a number of the problematics addressed in these visual works as discernible ‘world(s)’ of meaning and experience constituted by the libidinous investments, concrete practices, and ideological convictions of the human subjects who bear and circulate them.

[1] Maria Lugones, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, …

Echoes Of Leibniz In Pope’S Essay On Man: Criticism And Cultural Shift In The Eighteenth Century, Sierra Billingslea

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper is an examination of the intellectual relationship between Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This relationship was accentuated by Crousaz, a Swiss critic, who accused Pope of plagiarizing Leibniz’s misguided philosophy due to the evidence of Leibniz’s Principle of the Best, Principle of Sufficient Reason, and Principle of Continuity found within An Essay on Man. This paper argues that both Leibniz and Popes’ philosophies do not reflect a direct relationship but instead share the spirit of Augustan thought as well as a similar classical upbringing. Crousaz and other critics who criticized …

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …

Is Being Wicked The Same As Having Wickedness? A Dialogue On Human Nature Between Wicked, Frankenstein, And Rousseau’S Second Discourse, Emily R. Bezold

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis revolves around the characters of Elphaba, from the musical Wicked, and the Monster, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the comparison of these two verdant characters I seek to analyze their psychological development, starting from their conceptions, to their final moments in their respective stories. I will focus on the parallels between their relations with their fathers, other social connects they may or may not make, and their interaction within the wider social-political world of their stories. In this I seek to explain how Elphaba and the Monster come to represent two different types of man, according …

The Sounds Of Silence; Or, Isabella’S Counter Discourse In Measure For Measure, Gina Vivona

Theses and Dissertations

This argument reshapes the thinking about masculine dominance in Measure for Measure, and considers the patriarchy as a series of socially constructed, hence artificial, rules and regulations. It also explores how Isabella’s discourse and celibacy empower her to defy the constraints of early modern paradigms and achieve individual freedom.

A Wood Comes Toward Dunsinane: The Synthesis Of Traditional And Constructivist Methodologies, Randall L. Kaplan

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

Education professionals now favor Constructivist and project-based strategies for learning over Traditional methods, which include such frowned upon practices as rote memorization and recitation. The Constructivist approach is being taken to its natural apex by educators like Larry Rosenstock who have created Constructivist utopias such as High Tech High in San Diego, the school put under the microscope in the 2015 documentary film Most Likely to Succeed. Project-based, experiential units of study are effective, exciting, and edifying for both students and teachers. They promise to prepare students for the type of world they will inhabit, a world whose economy …

Tolkien And The Deadly Sin Of Greed, Amanda A. Kieffer

The Kabod

Tolkien’s genius as a writer and insight as a philosopher and theologian (of sorts) are reflected in his subtle yet impactful interweaving of the consequences of greed within the lives of the peoples of Middle-Earth. He shows readers that greed is not simply the love of money. Greed is the root of all evil, and it takes a variety of forms, as represented by Sauron’s desire to possess power over and control others, Saruman’s imitative desire, and Feanor’s over-possessiveness of his sub-creative acts. Tolkien also reveals that a proper relationship with nature can provide recovery from the drab familiarity which …

The Formation Of The Autonomous Woman Through A Hegelian Lens: A Comparative Study Of The British Fin De Siecle "New Woman" And The Post-Mao "Amazing" Woman, Robyn L. Buro

English Department Theses

This thesis utilizes the Hegelian concept of self-consciousness development to explore the formation of the autonomous woman within the New Woman movement of the British fin de siècle and the literature of women writers in 1980s Post-Mao China. The sexual figuration of the New Woman via an unremitting male gaze as well as the absence of individual awareness due to limited reflective self-assessment lead to a misrepresentation of the female figurehead in fin de siècle Britain. Through an in-depth study of literature by Charlotte Mew, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, and Thomas Hardy, the reader can identify key points of failure …

Society, Scientific Authority, And Linguistics: The Need For Epistemic Justification, Libby C. Chernouski

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

Many have considered Linguistics a science for decades, though linguists themselves have debated the accuracy of this characterization of the study of language. These conversations about linguistics as a science reveal a discipline intent on securing scientific status, often through rigorous methodology and theoretical frameworks mirroring the traditional sciences. If successful, however, linguistics inherits the authority of modern science, which maintains an epistemically hierarchical relationship with non-scientists. By examining and representing the epistemic relationships between expertise, authority, and science, I ask us to think of all linguistics not as a socially neutral endeavor, but as perpetuating the juxtaposition of scientific …