Philosophy Commons^™

Ambiguity Of Vision: Reimagining The Hypervisible Void, Kiwha Lee Blocman

Theses and Dissertations

Asking questions about what Painting is in the 21st century and the dominant narratives it can challenge, my paintings complicate the viewer’s reading of pictorial hierarchy and the projection of human relations in the world. I de-hierarchize and decentralize the compositional components that make up a painting by using patterns to create spatial depth, not European perspectival conventions. In dialogue with modernists such as Matisse who drew from the visual vocabulary of “The Orient”, my central forms derived from architecture and ornamental fragments possess a body-like presence. Further, I reinvent ancient Asian printmaking processes with oil paint. Observing the tenets …

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

New Animals, Alina Iakirevitch

Theses and Dissertations

To transfer the rhythms of the body into the earth, in Lippard’s language, one has to engage in a non verbal, illogical action. Art is the sphere of this action. Staying engaged with the unpredictable in us, the random, the primal, is the core of art making and encountering art.

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.

​​​​From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyses the dynamics of religious reform in the USSR from 1917 to 1943. It argues that the early Bolshevik policy of persecution was increasingly substituted by state co-optation. This dynamic was shaped primarily by Stalinist concerns with state security and problems of ideology.

“Paint What You Hate”: Philip Guston’S Hooded Figures And The Postponement Of The Exhibition Philip Guston Now, Thomas Baldwin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis interrogates the postponement of the Philip Guston Now exhibition, examining the justification for the postponement, the actions taken by the National Gallery of Art, and the effects of the postponement. My research examines the museum’s choice to cite social justice as the main context for understanding Philip Guston.

History And Philosophy Of Feynman’S Electrodynamics: From The Absorber Theory Of Radiation To Feynman Diagrams, Marco Forgione

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I individuate and discuss Richard Feynman’s overall spacetime view. I argue that the absorber theory of radiation, the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, all share the overall spacetime view as a common conceptual framework. Even though this framework changed with the different theories, its most general form can be characterized as the looking at physics phenomena in their spacetime entirety. I show how the absorber theory of radiation is based on the intertwining of past and future within a closed system of absorbers and emitters. I show how the path integral formulation of …

Alexa, Should I Trust You? A Theory Of Trustworthiness For Artificial Intelligence, Elizabeth K. Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

As people turn to AI driven technologies for help with everything from meal planning to choosing a mate, it is increasingly important for individuals to gauge the trustworthiness of available technologies. However, most philosophical theories of trustworthiness focus on interpersonal trust and are inappropriate for non-agents. What, then, does it mean for non-agents such as AI driven technologies to be trustworthy? I distinguish two different forms of trustworthiness: naive trustworthiness and robust trustworthiness. An agent is naively trustworthy to the extent that it would be likely to meet the truster’s expectations with respect to a given domain. An agent is …

The Cynics' Understanding Of And Contribution To Philosophy, Yossra Hamouda

Theses and Dissertations

The Cynics are an understudied school in the history of philosophy especially, if we compare the amount of literature written on the Cynics to the amount of literature written on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other Greek schools like the Epicureans, the Neo-Platonists and even the Stoics. The lack of research interest in the Cynics, both from the side of philosophers and historians, is possibly grounded in a lack of interest in understanding the Cynical conception of philosophy. Unless we take a serious interest in understanding the Cynical conception of philosophy, we risk reducing the Cynics to the historical clowns of …

Steve Mcqueen, The Filmmaker, And Kant’S Sensus Communis, Livia Melamed Margon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects on the ways in which art reinforces community and reduces political polarity by stimulating shared feelings, namely through Kant's idea of sensus communis. To illustrate its argument, this thesis analyzes the work of Steve McQueen, a politically aware, ethically engaged, and broadly recognized filmmaker and artist.

Rhetoric Of Collaboration: Using Ethics Of Social Justice And Activism Through Writing Communities, Tina M. Iemma

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines emerging writing community collectives that seek to challenge the normative hierarchy of higher education in both composition and curricula. I conduct empirical research to explore the ways activist writers, those with exposure to social justice literacies from across and outside academic communities, influence an ethics of collaboration and overall expansion of more public-facing, engaged and inclusive research pedagogy and scholarship. The act of writing in collectives is needed if a move toward advocacy and opportunity for equity is to be upheld within and beyond academia. By examining social justice literacies occurring both in and out of the …

Once Upon A Time/There Was A Story That Began: Novelty, Endings, And Chronotope In John Barth’S The Tidewater Tales, Zachary K. Gibson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them …

Snapshots Of A Fictional Past: Photographic Nostalgia In The Early 20th Century Art Novel., Harry A. Jones Iv

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue that the proliferation of a mass codependent relationship with nostalgia in the twentieth century shares a parallel history with the widespread adoption of the reproducible image being used by collective audiences as a supplement for natural memory, or what Proust names “voluntary memory.” This conflict between nostalgia-hungry consumers and artists inspired groups such as Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionists and artistically minded authors like Henry James, who employed increasingly complex photographic and literary practices to resist the images’ tendency to debase the aesthetic quality of their own work. Authors such as Marcel Proust and William Faulkner used …

The L1-Norm Regularized L1-Norm Best-Fit Line Problem And Applications, Xiao Ling

Theses and Dissertations

The best-fit subspace or low-rank approximation of a data matrix revolves
around the norm approximation technique. l²-norm criterion is probably the most
widely used norm for fitting subspaces. As the computational power increases, the
l¹-norm analogue has recently gained attention from the academic community. It is
widely agreed that the l¹ norm is insensitive to outliers, compared to its l² variant.
Because of the polyhedral structure interrelated with linear programming (LP),
the l⁰ norm is commonly relaxed into the l¹-norm problem to induce sparsity in
models. In this work, we examine …

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.

From The Corner Of One's Soul: The Methods Of Negotiating Tension In Cormac Mccarthy's Blood Meridian Or The Evening Redness In The West, Julian Pena

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a practical and meaningful reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, one that is rooted in the claim that both Judge Holden and the Kid reflect two different methods for negotiating a tension impinged upon them by their external circumstances. Using a theoretical framework that is inspired by the social psychological Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, this thesis provides an extensive analysis of the novel’s fictional universe, Judge Holden, and the Kid. Such an analysis elucidates the violent nature of Blood Meridian’s universe and further reveals the character of Judge Holden …

Models In Scientific Inquiry, Justin Price

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies how models become useful for scientific inquiry. Towards this study, I develop a theory on the cross-discipline transfer of mathematical models. The first part of this theory characterizes the way in which scientists must respond to the constraints in making a transferable model useable in their discipline. I invent the notion of a landing zone to identify the aspects of their domain that scientists prepare for the use of a transferrable model. The second part connects this response-to-constraints to cases of conceptual progress resulting from model transfer in biology and chemistry. The last part of this dissertation …

Beyond Mental And Physical Pain: A Non-Reductive Account Of Suicide, Aya Aly Ragheb

Theses and Dissertations

What is the stigma behind our understanding of suicide? What causes this stigma? Should suicide only be viewed in relation to physical pain, as medicine often views it, or mental pain, as psychiatry views it? Or is it a more complex phenomenon? Can we think of suicide as a rational act that is, on the one hand, independent of pain, without, on the other hand, reducing it to mental illness? I will argue that if we can, we can give a less reductive account of suicide. In this paper, we shall attempt to give an answer to the above questions …

Translation In And Of Philosophy, Hussein Barrada

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Ricoeur in his essay The Paradigm of Translation, presents an understanding of translation that is found between two positions that are irreconcilable. These two positions represent on the one hand, the difference that exists between languages and on the other hand, the common ground that languages must have for them to be translatable into one another. Following Ricoeur’s paradigm, the thesis will aim to unpack an understanding of translation as a tension that occurs between its theoretical impossibility and the reality of its everyday practice. The theoretical impossibility of translation lies in the fact that for one language …

An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how artists, intellectuals, spiritual seekers, and industrialists represented the American horizon across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose of this inquiry is to show how art transmuted ideological and religious beliefs across time and to demonstrate the interdependence of esoteric self-perceptions and American hegemonic power.

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

Where similarities in class struggle have historically operated as a unifying force globally, the American crafted mythos isolates the individual and dehumanizes those that do not fall within the parameters of the cowboy archetype. The national protagonist is turned into a class traitor and an extension of government power.

Husserl And Merleau-Ponty: A Feminist Critique Of The Phenomenological Body, Jasmin M. Makhlouf

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the phenomenological notion of embodiment, to explain the objectification and coercion that women and their bodies experience on a daily basis. I build the philosophical foundation of this thesis on Husserlian and Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, as well as, their work’s receptions in feminist philosophy of the early 20th century, mainly Simone de Beauvoir, as well as, more contemporary thinkers like Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. Moreover, the thesis argues for a return to the traditional phenomenological notion of embodiment while incorporating elements of sexuality and sexual difference.

Mathematical Realism From Reflectance Physicalism, Nicholas Matthew Danne

Theses and Dissertations

Do mirrors remain “reflective” objects in the dark, or does light shining onto a mirror instead give the mirror its reflective ability in the moment? More than an idle barstool question (like whether a tree falling in an abandoned forest makes a sound) the intrinsicality or light-independence of reflectance carries considerable philosophical import, since some philosophers reduce the human-visible colors to intrinsic surface reflectance. My dissertation, while remaining neutral on the best definition of color, argues that the received view of reflectance leaves it conceptually regressive and thus non-ascribable to surfaces. Rendering reflectance intrinsic to surfaces, I argue, requires a …

Searching: Waves, Spencer Molnar

Theses and Dissertations

This supportive statement examines a philosophical conception of the self and how it can be identified through experience, consciousness, and perception by focusing on a human inclination to rationalize, or concretize, that which is everchanging. The methods of exploring this concept were achieved by examining the formal structure of composition and materials through the process of visual art. By pushing against historical traditions of creating spatial illusions in visual art, we can conclude that the legibility of an artwork is equally dependent on the experiential world as it is the social construction of image making. The question that is left …

Fatal Softness, Mariah B. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

my work is about my teeth falling out, the fatal softness in the earth, a monster tattoo on leathered skin, the bliss of not-knowing, revelation, reveling, the ship and the shipwreck, a fire that knows the naming of you, its dark flame acquiring every part of you, smelling a bad candle at tj maxx, handing it to your mom to smell too, a darkness of that which is golden, a god-shaped hole, the petals of a monstrous flower,1 and frog spawn and at the middle of each jelly pearl is a little secret i don’t have to tell you.

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

Earth Tone Sigh Spell, Martha Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to the artist’s thesis exhibition titled Earth Tone Sigh Spell, conceived during the years 2020-21 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from May 1–15, 2021.

The following thesis explores themes of personal memory, geo-theory, myth, symbol, and historical event. The artist uses research and stream of consciousness writing methods as a way to weave these concepts together and tie them back to her own practice with installation, sculpture, and new media.

The Health Care Commons: A Philosophical Approach, Roel Feys

Theses and Dissertations

This project is the first large-scale and systematic effort to bridge the fields of commons research and biomedical ethics, with the aim of furthering key debates in both areas of inquiry. The aims and contributions of the project are twofold.

First, I argue that commons research is valuable to bioethics, because it provides a language to talk about health care institutions. I critically discuss commons research’s main conceptual tools in the context of health care: the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, the design principles of successful commons, parallel experimentation, and polycentric governance regimes. This conceptual apparatus can help to …

Eliberative Democracy In The Writing Classroom And Beyond Author(S): Michael Reich, Michael Reich

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I explore the consequences of adopting a deliberative pedagogy, based on the study of one or two sample courses taught in 2018 at St. John’s University. The project as a whole argues that the university should be an idea place for students to develop a sense of personal and political agency, and First Year Writing courses organized around deliberation allow students to learn to listen and reason with each other as individuals and as citizens. My first chapter defends the methodology of a humanistic idea of deliberation (a pedagogy not based in classroom drills or Standard English) …