Aesthetics Commons^™

Aestheticized Tragedy (Karuṇarasa) As An Intellectual Virtue, Lisa Widdison

Comparative Philosophy

In contemporary virtue epistemology, responsibilist intellectual virtues in the tradition of Aristotle's moral theory are acquired character traits involving a motivational component and a success component. The motivational component is an emotion that regulates inquiry but which would ordinarily, and problematically, carry bias. In order to monitor the patterns of fallibility in emotions, reflection can correct beyond perceptual errors or logical fallacies. Emotions which survive reflection are less partial and hold more epistemic valance than egotistical emotions. Since the framework of virtue epistemology might be at a loss for monitoring emotions reflectively, given the fact emotions operate rapidly and tend …

Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …

What We Owe To Our Audience: The Hermeneutical Responsibility Of Fiction Creators, Kathryn Wojtkiewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this project is to provide a theoretical underpinning for the belief that creators of fiction should dedicate time to diversifying the cast of characters in their fictions, and to avoiding harmful stereotypes when doing so. I establish this as a hermeneutical responsibility: because of the epistemic influence fictions can wield over their audiences, trafficking in harmful stereotypes of marginalized identities (instances of which I call Bad Representation Problems) or excluding marginalized identities entirely (which I call No Representation Problems) from one’s fictions can reinforce harmful beliefs about real people with those identities. The more popular the fiction, …

Placing God: Defining “Post-Christianity” For Contemporary Japanese Christians, Leryan Anthony Burrey

Master's Projects and Capstones

This work suggests that we consider a new, working definition of post-Christianity. This new paradigm is in response to Western Christian thought being too dominant a force that fails to take into enough account other global experiences— like those of Japanese Christians. These reflections are based on scholarly opinions claiming that Christianity is a “global culture,” and ultimately argues for more international inclusivity in Western Christian thought and institutions, especially regarding the Asia-Pacific. Moreover, this paper illuminates how iitoko dori allows Christian thought to peacefully coexist in Japan’s greater society. The research also explores specific Japanese cultural practices that make …

The Feeling Of Foam & Other Essays, Ryan Erickson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I create conceptual drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations to humorously destabilize and ultimately question how human language, formal methodologies, and social institutions function. While seemingly embracing an aesthetic of rationality, I undermine it with absurdity. In my work, I take a fundamentally dialectical position by skewering the rational to the illogical as neither can exist without the other.

It's Funny 'Cause It's True: The Lighthearted Philosophers’ Society’S Introduction To Philosophy Through Humor, Jennifer Marra Henrigillis, Steven Gimbel

Open Educational Resources

It's Funny 'Cause It's True is an introductory text in philosophy exploring logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics through questions in the philosophy of humor. Subfields receive a substantive introduction with interactive essays written to be accessible to undergraduates.

The Data City, The Idiom And Questions Of Locality, Noel Fitzpatrick

Articles

The paper aims to provide both a radical critique of the “smart city” as a techno-ideological apparatus,that through data analysis and algorithmic forms of governmentality tends to colonize space and time, and an attempt to reframe the very concept of intelligence within the smart cities. Two concepts are presented as tools for such a reframing: locality and idiom, where the first is conceived as openness of meaning generated by a territory, while the latter,analysed througha paradigmatic Irish example (Friel’s play Translations), prepares the ground for the pars construensof the paper. The claim, built by intertwining a set of authors (Ricoeur, …

Topics Of The Sky: Ashbery's Involving Search For The Poem, Tom M. Carlson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An essay lived by John Ashbery's Three Poems with special attention to the possibility of cosmic relevance. This paper attempts to imagine priorities and needs proper to celestial bodies. Three Poems is the consciousness that gives possibility to the text, while Blanchot, Nietzsche, and other thinkers ground its exploration in philosophical analysis.

Flower Unfurling: Buddhist Modernism And The Early Writing Of James Joyce, Erin Garrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the history of the references to Buddhism in Stephen Hero, James Joyce’s first and unpublished novel, through the author’s previous writing, his sources, and his context, in order to determine how—if at all—the tradition bore upon his earliest depiction of consciousness. Acknowledging that Joyce habitually revisited and refined earlier ideas and prose, it attends to previous essays, notebooks, book reviews, conversations, letters, epiphanies, poems, and autobiographical prose; to available material, bibliographical, and biographical evidence about the specific volumes and performances to which Joyce had access; to language and paratext—including advertisements, introductions, and appended essays—in those volumes; …

Wonder: A Phenomenological Exploration, Henry R. Kramer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper presents a phenomenology of wonder through careful description of the internal state of wonder, defined here as “full engagement with something that bewilders you.” This phenomenology explores what is at stake in regards to our inhibitions toward wonder, how we can overcome those inhibitions, what the experience of wonder is like, and what effects wonder can have on our lives and ethical activity. This includes an investigation of the relationships between wonder and topics such as judgment, attention, engagement, imagination, play, and our ethical treatment of the more-than-human world. This paper demonstrates that by cultivating wonder we are …

Course Syllabus (W19 Online) Coli 331t--Television Culture: "Lens, Mirror, Screen: Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell’s 1984, view Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

Arts-Based Education For Enchanting, Embodied And Embedded Sustainability, Hans Dieleman

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article sketches two contrasting ideal-typical narratives of sustainability, a disenchanting and an enchanting one, and argues that current thinking in sustainability is mainly situated in the narrative of disenchantment. This narrative is based on various obsolete philosophical assumptions, and hampers the transformation process, as it distances the population from being part of this. It then sketches the narrative of enchanting sustainability and shows how this has the capacity to engage, intrigue and motivate people to be involved. It is rooted in an arts-based approach of connecting aesthetics, associative thinking, reflective practice, emotion-based working, aspiration and intentionality. The article moves …

Tolkien’S Sub-Creation And Secondary Worlds: Implications For A Robust Moral Psychology, Nathan S. Lefler

Journal of Tolkien Research

In his work, “On Fairy Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien offers a detailed account of what he calls Sub-creation, along with the corresponding notions of Primary and Secondary Worlds. In this paper, I suggest that Tolkien’s concept of Sub-creation can be creatively appropriated in the realm of moral psychology and there applied to the fundamental relationship between self and other – or in Judeo-Christian terms, “I” and my neighbor. Through appeal to Tolkien’s thought and to the wider Christian theological tradition, and in constructive tension with the contemporary psychoanalytic attention to “intersubjectivity,” I attempt to elucidate the power and appropriate …

Complexity As A Narrative, Giacomo Pala

Journal of Applied Sciences and Arts

In this paper an attempt is made to discuss how the computer has imposed new conventions to architecture over the last thirty years. The paper’s aim is to discuss how the introduction of digital media has forced architecture to find ways to deal with new technologies and to develop new disciplinary meanings. First, the paper addresses the question of complexity and chaos in the postmodern discussion by the reading of Lyotard’s theories. Therefore, the essay pinpoints attempts of developing new conceptions of “complexity” in architecture derived from the post-modern sciences of indetermination. Interengsly enough, this was doable because both these …

A Case For A Husserlian Willardarian Approach To Knowledge, Joseph Gibson

Masters Theses

This thesis introduces certain aspects in the thought of Dallas Willard and Edmund Husserl as a new way forward in the internalism externalism debate. Husserl’s detailed analysis of cognition has application to epistemology and addresses in great depth an area which in the current discussion is often tertiary and shallow at best. It is argued that in both internalist and externalist camps there is a common assumption about cognition which Husserl argues forcibly against. This assumption is that thought, or cognition, is essentially linguistic. (The notion that ‘thought is essentially linguistic’ means that thought requires the use of language.) Whatever …

Wabi-Sabi Mathematics, Jean-Francois Maheux

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Mathematics and aesthetics have a long history in common. In this relation however, the aesthetic dimension of mathematics largely refers to concepts such as purity, absoluteness, symmetry, and so on. In stark contrast to such a nexus of ideas, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi values imperfections, temporality, incompleteness, earthly crudeness, and even contradiction. In this paper, I discuss the possibilities of “wabi-sabi mathematics” by showing (1) how wabi-sabi mathematics is conceivable; (2) how wabi-sabi mathematics is observable; and (3) why we should bother about wabi-sabi mathematics

Course Syllabus (Fa15) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Material Aesthetics", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

An examination of questions concerning aesthetic experience from the standpoint of the structural and functional logics of the capitalist mode of production

Presence-At-Hand, Eric Lyle Schultz

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

The writing that follows is intended to provide a theoretical framework for the motives behind my practice. The primary concerns addressed are the reception, transmission, and physical shape of knowledge. I will discuss a human condition that exists as a byproduct of both the legacy of representation as well as the innate biology of the brain. I will argue that as a society we are governed by the residue of an extreme logic, and that this condition places severe margins on our potential for creative solutions. I will propose that our ability to create meaning is stifled by the …

A Catholic Core Curriculum, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Nietzsches Hermeneutische, Phänomenologische Wissenschafts-Philosophie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen Zu Altphilologie Und Physiologie, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

The Identity Of The Διψυχος In The Shepherd Of Hermas, Jeremiah Mutie

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Method In Catholic Studies, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Changing Our Minds: Bernard Lonergan And Climate Change, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Review- Startling Strangeness: Reading Lonergan's., Randall Rosenberg

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Catholicity And Faculty Seminars, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Ignatius, Lonergan, And The Catholic University, Richard Liddy

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

Review- Startling Strangeness: Reading Lonergan's Insight. By Richard M. Liddy., Michael Mcguckian

Department of Religion Publications

No abstract provided.

A Critique Of The Historiographical Construal Of America As A Christian Nation, John David Wilsey

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Christian America thesis has grown in popularity over the past thirty years. This essay will critique the Christian America thesis, and instead offer the assertion that America was founded as a nation with religious liberty. Six lines of critique of the Christian America thesis will be presented, and the essay will attempt to show the significance of religious freedom in the founding. America‘s history points to a mixture of sacred and secular ideas. The nation is defined more realistically by religious freedom rather than a Christian identity. Evangelicals can approach those who do not share their faith commitment in …

Review: God's Rivals: Why Has God Allowed Different Religions? Insights From The Bible And The Early Church, Michael S. Jones

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.