Continental Philosophy Commons^™

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” …

The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …

Philosophy's Rarified Air: On Peden's Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Practicality Of Statistics: Why Money As Expected Value Does Not Make Statistics Practical, Sean Reimer

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis covers the uncertainty of empirical prediction. As opposed to objectivity, I will discuss the practicality of statistics. Practicality defined as "useful" in an unbiased sense, in relation to something in the external world that we care about. We want our model of prediction to give us unbiased inference whilst also being able to speak about something we care about. For the reasons explained, the inherent uncertainty of statistics undermines the unbiased inference for many methods. Bayesian Statistics, by valuing hypotheses is more plausible but ultimately cannot arrive at an unbiased inference. I posit the value theory of money …

Armed With An Easel: Understanding Artistic Political Praxis Through The Works Of Theodor Adorno And Chantal Mouffe, Evelyn Yu Yu Swe

Senior Independent Study Theses

This Independent Study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter examines the role of capitalism in the formation of our culture. The argument presented here is that culture plays an important role in reinforcing modern neoliberal capitalism and that neoliberal capitalism has massive control over the dissemination of culture and the arts. The chapter concludes that it is necessary to utilize socio-cultural means in combating the influence of capitalism, and there does indeed exist emancipatory potential in artistic political praxis.

The second chapter focuses on Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory in articulating his conception of the emancipatory potential of art. …

Quasi-Subjectivity And Ethics In Non-Modernity, Justin T. Simpson

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The inspiration behind this philosophical endeavor is an ethical one: interested in what it means to flourish as a human being – how to live well and authentically. Similar to medicine and how the ability to prescribe the appropriate treatment depends on first making a diagnosis, the focus of this work will to be understand the human condition and the ways in which subjectivity, one’s sense of self, is constituted. Given the general dissatisfaction with the modern metaphysical picture of the world, which analyzes the world in terms of the mutually exclusive and completely separate categories of nature/objects and society/subjects, …