Philosophy Commons^™

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: …

Hegel's Unconscious: Analyzing Matter In The Philosophy Of Nature, Andrew Kingston

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis analyzes the structural position of matter within the philosophical system of nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Concentrating on the Philosophy of Nature, it reads Hegel’s treatment of matter psychoanalytically and semiotically as the unconscious to his anthropological (spiritual) and logical philosophy, which otherwise constitutes the majority of his writings. To do so, this thesis explores a proliferation of figurative language throughout Hegel’s text, specifically in his writing on mechanics, light, the elements, and organic life. In this investigation, Hegel’s work is considered alongside the work of Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Gaston Bachelard, and Rodolphe …

Rotman Institute Speaker: Feminist Neo-Materialism And The Future Of Phenomenology, Dorothea Olkowski

Future Directions in Feminist Phenomenology

No abstract provided.

Husserl's Transcendental Idealism And The Problem Of Solipsism, Rodney Parker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A pervasive interpretation among Husserl scholars is that his transcendental idealism inevitably leads to some form of solipsism. The aim of this dissertation is to defend Husserl against this charge. First, I argue that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is not a metaphysical theory. Transcendental phenomenology brackets all metaphysical presuppositions and argues from experience to the conditions of the possibility of experience. Husserl’s transcendental idealism should therefore be interpreted as a transcendental theory of knowledge. Second, it follows from the above characterization of Husserl’s transcendental idealism that the responses Husserl gives to the problem of solipsism are in no way meant to …

Infanticide And The Anxious Silence Of “Language As Such”, Kevin Godbout

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

No abstract provided.

Georges Bataille, Philosopher Of Laughter, Troy M. Bordun

Modern Languages and Literatures Annual Graduate Conference

Why is it that when we laugh – not at jokes or to patronize – but when we laugh ecstatically and drift away from the self that seemed to constitute the majority of waking life, we feel free, at ease? And why is it, asked Georges Bataille, that after this ecstatic moment we come back to the mundane everyday with the feeling of a new and ineffable knowledge about human existence?

In this paper I present Bataille on laughter and its merits as a philosophical project. Laughter is an experience to be theorized and a praxis aiding in our pursuit …

Maurice Merleau-Ponty And Hannah Arendt: The Intersection Of Institution, Natality, And Birth, Nathaniel Coward

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Establishing respectively the relevant concepts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt, this thesis links flesh and the inter esse as both bespeaking of a fruitful dialectical relationship wherein the new is born by making its visible appearance. This advent of the visible is made possible in differentiation from an implied invisibility, which for both authors determines a connection between nature and temporality; nature as related to the appearance of the visible as grounded upon temporal implications within the invisible. Commensurate temporal structures of the invisible between these authors demonstrate birth as institutional (the continuation of a historically contingent sensibility) and …