Philosophy Commons^™

Equipmentality As A Pharmakon, Sherif Khalil

Theses and Dissertations

One must lose the world to know himself, if in his attempt to know the world he lost himself.

In this thesis, I argue that equipment is a pharmakon in that its harm lies in the service it is supposed to provide. Through equipment one gets to have a practical sense of the world. But, the world in this sense is a world for everyone and for no one in particular, that is, it is made to the measure of the average person who has no aspirations to realize his authenticity. That is how equipment helps us practically make sense …

The Hand Of Thought: A Cross-Tradition Examination Of Kosho Uchiyama And Martin Heidegger, Gregory Burgin

Comparative Philosophy

This paper presents how the Sōtō Zen priest, Kōshō Uchiyama, and the mercurial and polarizing German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, approach what the former calls “opening the hand of thought” (omoi no te banashi). For Uchiyama, the metaphoric opening of our mental hand requires the meditative practice of zazen or “just sitting” (shikantaza) and is said to mean that we avoid the act of thinking. Conversely, Heidegger maintains that the “releasement” (Gelassenheit) of our conceptual grasp is the basis of a more essential and “meditative” mode of thinking and discourse (besinnliches Denken). While Uchiyama and Heidegger appear to be at odds, …

The Psychedelic Dasein: Modelling The Effects Of Psilocybin With Heidegger’S Phenomenology, Eamon Robert Stuart Macdougall

Major Papers

This paper argues that the mystical experience induced by psilocybin (understood through the tradition of Heideggerian phenomenology) modulates the attuned understanding of oneself, the world, and how the individual relates to the world. This kind of particular experience is not accessible to the individual through ordinary consciousness, therefore psilocybin may give us access to a new kind of understanding. This understanding may offer a solution to the empirical deficiencies surrounding the short-term and long-term effects of psilocybin, such as how a meagre two to three high doses have yielded unprecedented results in the treatment of tobacco addiction, and in the …

The Nature And Role Of Phenomenology In Hegel And Heidegger, Gabriel W. Connor

LSU Master's Theses

In this work I compare Hegel and Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology and its role in their thinking. Though these two thinkers are not often examined from this angle, and though there is controversy surrounding just how phenomenological each thinker might actually be, an examination of the two thinkers in this regard serves to identify interesting connections between Hegel and Heidegger while also raising questions about phenomenology in general. In short, I seek to establish that phenomenology in both Hegel and Heidegger is not adequately understood unless it is placed in the context of each thinker’s conception of human freedom along …

Beyond Instrumentalism: Exploring The Affordance Construal Of Technology In Heidegger, Federico Jose Lagdameo

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

Current philosophies of technology derived from and inspired by Heidegger’s—exemplified by Postphenomenology and Critical Constructivism—have favored a focus on technological design issues; succumbing consequently; to an instrumental view of technology. This favored focus had contributed to an obliviousness to technology’s inherent dangers which are precisely immune from technological design modifications. Exploring the construal of technology as affordances; this paper offers a contrasting reading of Heidegger’s technology as embedded and embodied dispositions for specific possibilities for being and doing. Consequently; it argues for a more viable alternative to the often-implicit instrumentalist and artefactual view of technologies that frequently undergird prevalent empirical …

The Ontological Grounds Of Reason: Psychologism, Logicism, And Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Stanford L. Howdyshell

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The following dissertation explains the psychologism debate as it played out in the 19thand early 20th Centuries and then shows how Martin Heidegger radicalized the debate by undermining its key themes and assumptions. First, I explain each side of the psychologism debate, starting with the psychologicists. I explore the philosophies of Jakob Friedrich Fries and John Stuart Mill in order to encapsulate the full spectrum of psychologism in the 19th Century, from Neo-Kantian to British Empiricist. The investigation will show a set of common themes within psychologism, such as the grounding of logic in the constitution of the human subject, …

Pandemic Experience And The Concept Of World, Paul Turner

Critical Humanities

This article begins with some common or well-known sentiments about the present pandemic era and our experience of it, and moves by way of these toward discussion of the concepts of human existence and the “world” in the broadest sense of both terms. Departing from but also radicalizing the notion that “everything changed” in this pandemic time, I discuss certain logical difficulties that pertain to conceiving of or coherently talking about strict totalities which would include our own selves. This will have significant consequences for our conception of the world (when taken in its absolute or broadest sense), and in …

To The Lighthouse Or To Mrs. Ramsay? A Study Of Materialization Through The Symbolism Of The Lighthouse In Virginia Woolf’S To The Lighthouse, Virginia Moscetti

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

In this paper, I argue that the “lighthouse” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse operates as a symbol for Mrs. Ramsay’s “self-hood” and for Mr. Ramsay’s obscure desire for sanctuary and domesticity in Mrs. Ramsay. Through this symbolism I further contend that Woolf renders the ambiguous processes associated with self-hood and desire materially legible and, in doing so, demonstrates how metaphor and symbolism reconstitute our material world into representation. Moreover, I argue that we can conceptualize the lighthouse symbolism revolving around and centered in Mrs. Ramsay in terms of T.J. Clark’s “dual figure”; a figure with two symbolic connotations …

Hema Upadhyay: Disrupting The Hegemony Of The Slums, A Negative Social Spiral., Silvia Márquez Pease

Department of Art and Art History

This essay presents the theoretical framework that informs my reflections on the hegemony of the slums’ poverty and human conditions, and whether art can disrupt the hegemony and also become a conduit to question our Being, hence Dasein, as per Martin Heidegger. The following pages investigate the work of Hema Upadhyay, in India, and specially, her inspiring protest work offering insights on India’s overpopulation in urban areas such as, Dharavi. She depicts slums becoming a continuum circle of human misery and wealth, politically called a negative social spiral. I argue that the slums, not only destroy the harmony and promise …

Reading And Understanding: A Defense Of Heideggerian Hermeneutics And Philogy, Phillip M. Gandy

LSU Master's Theses

This paper addresses methodologies espoused by the hermeneutic tradition begun under Martin Heidegger. I argue for the methodologies of Philology, Destruktion and the use of poetic language in order to understand and communicate fundamental truths about Dasein. I demonstrate that these methods provide us, hermeneutically, with a closer and more precise understanding than simple communication in common speech.

Decentered, Together, Alone: Thinking The Virtual World With Heidegger’S Being And Time, Margaux Juliette Suinat

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

“The Pealing Of Stillness”: Gadamer On Georg Trakl, Ian Alexander Moore

Philosophy Faculty Works

Addressing the place of the Austrian poet, Georg Trakl, in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, this article turns in particular to Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening” in order to unfold a sense of language in dialogue with the poet. This engagement equally becomes the occasion for Gadamer to confront Heidegger, whose own reading of Trakl becomes both an inspiration and a challenge.

The Empathetic Autistic: A Phenomenological Look At The Feminine Experience, Dana Fritz

Dissertations (1934 -)

Western philosophy has asserted that in order to be a person, one must be rational. This idea was not challenged until the nineteenth century. One school to challenge this notion was phenomenology, which asserted that what made one a person was their ability to empathize. While the founder of the school, Edmund Husserl, did not assert that the ability to decipher nonverbal cues was necessary in order to empathize, several of his followers did. This emphasis on deciphering nonverbal cues proved problematic for some populations, especially the Autistic. Autism is a neurological condition which makes it difficult to decipher nonverbal …

Being-In-Capital: A Study In The Existential And Sociological Conditions Of Post-Industrial Capitalism, Edgar Mauricio Llamas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is threefold: firstly, to argue for the possibility of a Heideggerian Marxism through demonstration; secondly, to attempt to establish the foundation for a future phenomenology of capitalism; and thirdly, to attempt to redress Karl Marx’s weak theory of alienated subjectivity. I do this through the gradual development of a new concept that I have come to call being-in-capital. The first chapter is thus generally dedicated to preparation, concretized through a familiarization with Martin Heidegger’s system of thought, as embodied in four of his works: Being and Time, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the …

Heidegger And The Second Nature Of Entities: Sense, Ontology, And Normativity, Graham C. Bounds

Philosophy ETDs

This dissertation is concerned with the meaning or content of empirical thought and its relationship to the natural world. More specifically, I seek to develop a response to a problem influentially posed by John McDowell in Mind and World, and elaborated in various forms throughout his work, according to which our understanding of such content is positioned between two competing demands about how it is determined: by the way the world is, and by the trappings of a human form of life, in particular, language.

That response is worked out primarily by appeal to the early work of Martin …

Phenomenology Of Death: The Religious Dimension In The Ethical Thought Of Emmanuel Levinas, Changhyun Kim

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores Levinas’s phenomenology of death in order to unveil the religious dimension in his ethical thought through examining the political moment of the third party. I argue that death is neither a pure phenomenon transparently intelligible in the noema-noesis structure of intentionality nor a mere non-phenomenon totally irrelevant to the phenomenological investigation. Rather, death is a para-phenomenon whose unfathomable feature calls into question Levinas’s two important philosophical precedents: 1) Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, in a methodological sense, and 2) Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of death, in a thematical sense. On the one hand, Levinas faces in the para-phenomenality of death …

Merleau-Ponty's Poetic Of The World: Philosophy And Literature [Table Of Contents], Galen A. Johnson, Emmanuel De Saint Aubert, Mauro Carbone

Philosophy & Theory

Merleau-Ponty’s Poets and Poetics offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation …

An Interpersonal Account Of Heideggerian Ethics: An Analysis Of Being And Time, William Braxton Bragg

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In what follows, I will present an interpersonal account of Being and Time that runs counter to most of the standard literature. There are a few moving parts to this paper that must be addressed before moving forward. Section II addresses both Heidegger’s political affiliations as well as the connection to ethics. By presenting some of the more prominent interpretations in the literature, a picture of how one can read a political ideology into Being and Time becomes possible. This is followed by Section III, where I immediately address and eschew those concerns by presenting an account that does in …

Disclosing Mathematics, Tre Schumacher

Undergraduate Research

According to Heidegger, phenomenology is critical of purely metaphysical thinking insofar as the history of Western metaphysics has discounted the significance of physis. For Heidegger, Western metaphysics has lost its way by ‘forgetting’ being, and likewise so has logic. This paper will argue that if mathematics aims to investigate the truth of being, then ontology has been divorced from the investigation of mathematical truth in a similar fashion that ontology has been divorced from logic and the history of Western metaphysics for Heidegger.

Heidegger's Phenomenology: 1919-1929, Joseph Arthur Giavotella

LSU Master's Theses

In this work, I show Martin Heidegger’s development of the phenomenological method from 1919 to 1929 as his main approach to all philosophical inquiry. In Chapter 1: Phenomenology as the Hermeneutics of Factical Life, I first show how Heidegger begins his philosophical career in 1919 with lectures that describe phenomenology as an ‘original science’ that seeks to study the structural character of life in itself. Through the four sub-sections of Chapter 1, I show how Heidegger continues to formulate distinct stages of phenomenological methodology through these early lectures that aid in his task to continue the explication of life through …

Nostalgia And (In)Authentic Community: A Bataillean Answer To The Heidegger Controversy, Patrick Miller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism has been debated since the 1930s. In the late 1930s, Georges Bataille wrote an incomplete text that would have added to these debates, “Critique of Heidegger: Critique of a philosophy of fascism.” I draw on this fragment and Bataille’s writings from this era in order to develop a fuller critique of Heidegger and his relationship to fascism. This expanded critique completes the promise of Bataille’s original fragment, offering a full Bataillean criticism of Heidegger and displaying the connections between his philosophy and Bataille’s understanding of fascism. This critique hinges on Heidegger’s concept of authenticity and community, …

Authenticity In Finitude: Interpretation Of Heidegger, Jinyoung Lee

CMC Senior Theses

This paper organizes Martin Heidegger’s argument for authenticity in Being and Time into a two-step process with two binaries. The first binary is an interpretation for the world, with what Heidegger calls ‘ready-to-hand’ coming prior to ‘present-at-hand.’ The second binary is an interpretation for the self, where he distinguishes the ‘authentic self’ from the ‘they-self.’ With human existence represented as Dasein, or Being-there, Heidegger paints a path for authenticity within the world of relations and the world we live with others.

For coherence between the two binaries, we need a reinterpretation of time. The second section of this paper focuses …

Poetic Becoming: Building With Heidegger, Isabella Menuez Santana

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Installation: Untitled#0420, Thesis: Is The Artist’S Position Valid And Necessary To Her Completed Artworks ? —— An Investigation Of The Artist’S Position Through Martin Heidegger’S Poetry, Language, Thought And The Fisherman Analogy, Coco Ma

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Artist statement:

In my practice of mixed-media sculptures and installations, I use different kinds of materials in unexpected ways to provoke uncertainties, inquiries, and reflections. My works entice people to stop and pay close attention. In this process, they may be confused and amused. By being labor- intensive and repetitive with ordinary materials, my works inspire people to see familiar forms and materials in new and fresh ways. Underneath the familiarity of the materials is the “white noise,” a hum of dissonance between the familiar and the strange.

The installation Untitled#0420 uses fishing lines as its major component, which is …

The Temple Of Athena And The Return Of The Salmon: Orientations Toward Nature And Meaning In Salishan/Sahaptin/Wakashan (Northwest American Indigenous) And Heideggerian Philosophy, RóIsíN Lally, Daniel O'Dea Bradley

Leadership Studies Faculty Scholarship

In Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger presents an evocative claim about the way the Temple to Athena on the Acropolis, opens a world rich with meaning and resonant with significance that orients the Athenian people within reality thus allowing their relations to others and to nature to appear as meaningful and ultimately nourishing. In other words, the Temple, like all great works of art, opens a world that is also a home. This article reviews the import of Heidegger’s reflection on monumental art, but we quickly turn to the principle objection to Heidegger’s thought, which is that the …

Tedio: Una Reflexión Filosófica En Torno A La Pregunta ¿Cómo Nos Aburrimos?, German Ramiro Baron Rincon

Filosofía y Letras

No abstract provided.

On The Question Of Thinking: A Study Of Heidegger's Later Philosophy, Shishir Budha

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the writings of the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger to understand what “thinking” is and how thinking needs to be undertaken. I examine Heidegger’s commitments to phenomenology in his early writings, his revaluation of the meaning of truth in traditional Western metaphysics, his criticism of calculative thinking and scientific rationality, his diagnosis of the human alienation and homelessness, and his evocation of the redemptive power of art and poetry through which we can find our place in the world. By questioning through all these themes, I attempt to trace Heidegger’s path towards a deeper and more original …

The Efficacy Of Comedy, Mark Anthony Castricone

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Efficacy of Comedy: Focusing on the efficacy of comedy as a genre, utilizing Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s philosophy. It begins with a historical analysis of the efficacy of comedy in Ancient 4th and 5th century Athens focusing on Aristotle’s conceptions of comedy. It analyses what Aristotle wrote about comedy and attempts a reconstruction of what his book on comedy from the poetics may have said. It then examines the shift to aesthetics rather than the Philosophy of Art with a focus on Kant and the Critique of Judgment. Comedy here is used as an interpretive tool in order to …

The City As Illusion And Promise, Remmon E. Barbaza

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

In The City as Illusion and Promise, the author examines the claim (by Henri Lefebvre, and later David Harvey) that the city no longer exists, at least as we know it. What we have instead is merely an illusion, something that Martin Heidegger also implies in some of his later writings, notably his seminal work on the essence of technology. In confronting such an extreme proposition, the author first raises a conceptual problem: Is the city a city insofar as it is not a province? And vice versa? But the conceptual problematic of course is also manifested in actual material …

Darkness And Light: Absence And Presence In Heidegger, Derrida, And Daoism, Steven Burik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The light metaphor is a perpetual favorite for philosophers, both East and West. I seek to revaluate its opposite, darkness. I claim that there are good reasons to favor darkness over light, or at least to not see them as mutually incompatible or in hierarchical fashion. In recent Western philosophy, both Heidegger and Derrida argue that what the light metaphor represents, the promise of clarity and objectivity, is exactly what makes Western metaphysics problematic. In Chinese philosophy, classical Daoism offers a thinking that does not favor the light metaphor over its opposite. Daoists have the good sense to acknowledge darkness …