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Aesthetics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Aesthetics

Humanity Amid Innovation: Exploring Our Relationship To Technology, Sarah Durkee May 2024

Humanity Amid Innovation: Exploring Our Relationship To Technology, Sarah Durkee

Senior Theses and Projects

This thesis examines the impacts of technology on fundamental aspects of human nature and experience. Drawing on the works from Kant, Turing, Arendt, Benjamin, and Freud, it explores how rapid technological change is redefining human reason, intelligence, and creativity in the digital age. The first chapter analyzes whether modern online communication platforms realize or undermine Kant's vision of an enlightened public sphere fostering free discourse and critique. It argues that prioritizing engagement over substantive debate, these digital realms corrode the depth of interaction essential for cultivating human reason. The second chapter explores the pursuit of artificial intelligence as a reproduction …


Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier Dec 2016

Sketches, Impressions And Confessions: Literature As Experiment In The Nineteenth Century, Andrew Ragsdale Lallier

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue for the existence and critical relevance of a program of experimental literature in the long nineteenth century, developed in the aesthetics of German Romanticism and adapted in a set of texts by Thomas De Quincey, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. My introduction positions this argument in context of larger debates concerning form, theory and literary capacity, provides points of connection between these authors, and outlines the most prominent features of experimental literature. In the first chapter, I present an unorthodox reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, accompanied by a brief account of the literary-critical …