Continental Philosophy Commons^™

Beyond The Veil: Critical Black Kantianism And The Ethics Of Structural (In)Visibility, Paradise A. Stanford

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation develops what I call Critical Black Kantianism, a reconstructive approach to Kantian moral philosophy that centers race, recognition, and the structural conditions under which moral agency is formed. While Kantian ethics typically presumes idealized agents operating within just social contexts, this project argues that such abstraction obscures how racial domination actively shapes autonomy, dignity, and self-consciousness. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’ account of double consciousness, Black feminist thought, and contemporary theories of recognition, I show that moral agency is not merely exercised within social environments but is constituted through them—often under conditions of misrecognition that fracture autonomy.

Against …

Hannah Arendt As Hermeneutic Phenomenologist: Natality And The Miracle Of Philosophy, Andrew H. Marquis

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

I argue that Hannah Arendt practiced hermeneutic phenomenology in the canonical mode of her mentor, Martin Heidegger. Hermeneutic phenomenology is not a philosophical school defined by methods, results, or topics. It is a practice of transformative thinking by which we work through the burdens of who and how we have been towards the possibilities of who and how we could be. Heidegger, burdened by the scientism of his philosophical milieu, articulated this practice not by rejecting scientistic philosophies outright but by interpretively recovering their most promising tendencies.

Though seldom recognized as a hermeneutic phenomenologist, Arendt’s philosophical response to Nazism reveals …

Internalism, Externalism, And The Phenomenology Of Epistemic Justification, Steven Winterfeldt

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation applies a phenomenological method of analysis to the dispute between analytic internalists and externalists regarding epistemic justification. Traditionally, the justification condition on knowledge has been interpreted as an internal condition, but the growing popularity of the externalist antithesis has placed internalism on the defensive. Ultimately, however, the dispute appears to have fallen into an impasse. I identify a set of four arguments or cases that, when taken together, prompt us to adopt a set of contradictory conclusions about the necessary and sufficient conditions for justified belief. Moreover, none of the analytic views of justification surveyed seem to be …

Relationality In Rousseau's Philosophy Of Education, Thayne Cameron

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s assertion of Emile that “Our true study is that of the human condition” serves as the foundation for this dissertation, which examines the significance of certain kinds of basic experiential relationships in Rousseau’s philosophy of education. By analyzing the relationships between the self and objects, the self and others, and the educator and the learner, this work elucidates how these interactions underpin Rousseau’s pedagogical views and their implications for fostering personal and social virtue.

The dissertation explores the self-object relationship through affectivity, embodiment, and purposeful activity, demonstrating how direct engagement with objects shapes perceptions and behaviors. It then …

Being And Historical Change In Hegel's Science Of Logic, Jarrad Felgenhauer

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation, Being and Historical Change in Hegel’s Science of Logic, examines the immanent relationship between metaphysics and history, specifically historical change, through an examination of Hegel’s Science of Logic. It seems to me that this relationship has been under-explored both in metaphysics broadly and Hegel scholarship specifically. For instance, many authors have discussed the role of history in Hegel’s philosophy and many others have focused on his metaphysics. But only a few have discussed how these two aspects immanently intersect with one another; specifically, what the examination of metaphysics can teach us about interpreting history and historical …

Care Working Conditions: The Ethics And Politics Of Social Reproductive Labor From Aristotle To Marxist Feminism, Andrew R. Van't Land

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The spectre of an inescapably divided working class has haunted every generation of marxist theorists, including the latest wave of marxist feminists engaged in the research programme known as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). In this dissertation, I will explain how Marx’s clear theoretical debt to Aristotle extends into the marxist feminist analysis of social reproductive labor and of the exploitation, class interests, and normative demands which condition such care workers. I will demonstrate how SRT can follow Marx’s own example in reading Aristotle, critically yet charitably, in order to resolve three problems. First, Aristotle’s original concept of use value (built …

Kierkegaard's Theory Of Boredom And The Development Of Personality, Luke Wadhams

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation examines the conception of boredom presented in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is known for deriving philosophical insights into human nature from phenomenological analyses of various moods. However, while Kierkegaard provides explicit and complete accounts of anxiety, despair, and melancholy, his analyses of boredom are only ever fragmentary and dispersed. Additionally, most scholars either neglect Kierkegaard’s descriptions of boredom or dismiss them as mere novelty, and, even though a few scholars analyze the concept, there is still no sustained and thorough account of the same. This dissertation advances Kierkegaard scholarship by piecing together Kierkegaard’s theory of boredom …

Place And Digital Space, Suraj Chaudhary

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The intersection of philosophies of space and technology is a fecund area of inquiry that has received surprisingly little attention in the philosophical literature. While the major accounts of space and place have not considered complexities introduced by recent technological developments, scholarship on the human-technology relationship has virtually ignored the spatial dimensions of this interaction. Place and Digital Space takes a step in addressing this gap in literature by offering an original, phenomenological account of place and using this framework to analyze digitally mediated spaces. I argue that places are continually evolving, internally heterogenous, and spatially distinct meaningful wholes with …

Catharine Mackinnon, Feminism, And Continental Philosophy: Comments On Toward A Feminist Theory Of The State—Twenty-Five Years Later, Natalie Nenadic

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Catharine MacKinnon’s feminist work on sexual abuse and violence has had a major impact on law and on policy in the United States and internationally. However, her complex theoretical writings, which are a foundation of that work, have yet to be adequately appreciated by philosophy, especially continental philosophy, that tradition with which she identifies her project. I explain her project in continental terms, especially Heidegger’s thought, so that we may better grasp the philosophical nature and significance of her work. In doing so, I also open paths by which those within the continental tradition may make it more relevant to …

Transcendental Idealism’S Theory Of Selfhood: Fichte On The Relationship Between Knowing Oneself And Moral Deliberation, Caroline Ann Buchanan

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In this dissertation, I take on an exegetical project of understanding how Fichte’s theory of the self influences his account of moral deliberation, and specifically, his account of conscience. I argue that moral action can only be understood within Fichte’s system as possible on the basis of the individual’s own cognitive awareness that they are not only bound by the moral law, but that they are so in virtue of their essential nature as selves. In other words, the feeling of conscience in Fichte’s work, and the decision to abide it, requires that the acting individual recognize that the ought …

Motivation And The Primacy Of Perception, Peter A. Antich

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded on perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see …

The Normative Architecture Of Reality: Towards An Object-Oriented Ethics, Justin L. Harmon

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The fact-value distinction has structured and still structures ongoing debates in metaethics, and all of the major positions in the field (expressivism, cognitivist realism, and moral error theory) subscribe to it. In contrast, I claim that the fact-value distinction is a contingent product of our intellectual history and a prime object for questioning. The most forceful reason for rejecting the distinction is that it presupposes a problematic understanding of the subject-object divide whereby one tends to view humans as the sole source of normativity in the world. My dissertation aims to disclose the background against which human ethical praxis is …

Forget Not The Whip! Nietzsche, Perspectivism, And Feminism: A Non-Apologist Interpretation Of Nietzsche’S Polemical Axiology, Jennifer L. Hudgens

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is notoriously a misogynist according to many feminists. In parallel, Nietzsche’s theory of value, perspectivism, is relativist according to many philosophers. However, I propose a counter-reading of both Nietzsche’s comments regarding women and his comments regarding perspective in which I interpret Nietzsche as neither misogynistic nor relativistic. I adopt a stance which is non-apologist, in that I do not merely wash my hands of Nietzsche’s apparently sexist remarks about women as Walter Kaufmann does, for example. Rather I demonstrate that Nietzsche is performing a polemical attack on a particular kind of naïve feminism which …

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation Of Consciousness In Postwar American Novels, Nathan A. Shank

Theses and Dissertations--English

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to …

Critical-Reflective Thinking: A Phenomenology, Margot D. Wielgus

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

This dissertation formulates and describes a type of thinking called critical-reflective thinking. Examples of critical-reflective thinking appear in the works of many major Western philosophical figures, including the main thinkers considered here, Plato, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Henry David Thoreau. Although this list of thinkers is eclectic, these philosophers come together in describing a common phenomenon, although they do not thematically designate or explain it. Their works illustrate a type of thinking in which people are invited by prompting events to consider their presuppositions—notions they have taken as true without prior consideration. I have deemed this phenomenon “critical-reflective thinking” …

A Schizocartography Of The University Of Leeds: Cognitively Mapping The Campus, Tina Richardson

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Since 2009 I have been walking and mapping the University of Leeds (United Kingdom) campus as part of the research for my thesis which I shall be submitting shortly. While not a cartographer, nor artist, I am a psychogeographer: someone who studies and critiques the urban environment using walking as part of the methodology.While this mapping aspect of my thesis sits within a larger project of critiquing the historical use and acquisition of campus space by the university, the cartographical part stands in its own right. Some of the examples provided in this essay are created as a response to …