Continental Philosophy Commons^™

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 …

An Introduction To Blaga's Philosophy For Readers Of Zalmoxis, Michael Jones

Faculty Publications and Presentations

In his excellent preface to Plantus' translation of Zalmoxis, Keith Hitchins mentions, but does not describe in detail, the philosophical system created by Lucian Blaga as a compliment to and source of his drama and poetry. In her forward, Plantus, the translator of Zalmoxis, likewise alludes to the philosophical undercurrents present in Blaga’s literary works in general and in Zalmoxis in particular. In my chapter I briefly outline this philosophical system for the readers of Zalmoxis. I do so – and the translator has invited me to do so – because, while Blaga’s poetry is not slave to his philosophy, …

Welcoming Newcomers And Becoming Native To A Place_ Arendt’S Polis And The City Beautiful Of Detroit.Pdf, Jules Simon

Selected Works Temporary Series

My goal, in interpreting Arendt’s analyses of the polis – both modern and ancient – is to conceptualize the role that ‘healthy’ public spaces can play in modern cities. What distinguishes my interpretation of her work is how I integrate her seminal conception of a philosophy of natality in the constellation of elemental concepts: labor, work, and action, as a way to understand the rise and fall of Detroit and to set the possible horizon for its reincarnation as a ‘sustainable’ and flourishing city beautiful. For me, it is precisely this conceptualization, as a philosophy of natality, that enables us …

Recognition And Positive Freedom, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A number of well-known Hegel-inspired theorists have recently defended a distinctive type of social freedom that, while bearing some resemblance to Isaiah Berlin’s famous description of positive freedom, takes its bearings from a theory of social recognition rather than a theory of moral self-determination. Berlin himself argued that recognition-based theories of freedom are really not about freedom at all (negatively or positively construed) but about solidarity, More strongly, he argued that recognition-based theories of freedom, like most accounts of solidarity, oppose what Kant originally understood to be the essence of positive freedom, namely the setting of volitional ends in accordance …

Death In Berlin: Hegel On Mortality And The Social Order, Thimo Heisenberg

Philosophy Faculty Research and Scholarship

It is widely acknowledged that Hegel holds the view that a rational social order needs to reconcile us to our status as natural beings, with bodily needs and desires. But while this general view is well-known, one of its most surprising implications is rarely explored: namely the implication that, for Hegel, a rational social order also has to reconcile us to the inevitable fate of everything natural and organic – it needs to reconcile ourselves to our own mortality. This paper explains this largely unknown dimension of Hegel’s view, as well as its implications for contemporary social philosophy. The …

Welcoming Newcomers And Becoming Native To A Place_ Arendt’S Polis And The City Beautiful Of Detroit.Pdf, Jules Simon

Departmental Papers (Philosophy)

My goal, in interpreting Arendt’s analyses of the polis – both modern and ancient – is to conceptualize the role that ‘healthy’ public spaces can play in modern cities. What distinguishes my interpretation of her work is how I integrate her seminal conception of a philosophy of natality in the constellation of elemental concepts: labor, work, and action, as a way to understand the rise and fall of Detroit and to set the possible horizon for its reincarnation as a ‘sustainable’ and flourishing city beautiful. For me, it is precisely this conceptualization, as a philosophy of natality, that enables us …

Symposium On Justin Remhof's Nietzsche's Constructivism: A Metaphysics Of Material Objects (Routledge, 2018), Justin Remhof

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of objects, the relation of objects to human minds, and how different views of objects impact commitments in many areas of philosophy―not just metaphysics, but also language, epistemology, science, logic and mathematics, and even ethics. In this book, Remhof presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s material object metaphysics. He argues that Nietzsche embraces the controversial constructivist view that all concrete objects are socially constructed. Reading …

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 …

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 …

Reconceptualizing College Impact Studies Through A Fractal Assemblage Theory, Laura Elizabeth Smithers

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

College impact studies have formed the common sense of understanding institutional relationships to student growth and change for decades. In this time, they have become entangled with the production of the neoliberal university. This paper¹ presents an alternative theorization of student change on campus, a fractal assemblage theory. Assemblage theory is discussed through a single common language of major assemblage theory concepts across four authors. After exploring these concepts in depth, this paper returns to the stakes of assemblage theory: higher education research not to channel student to predetermined outcomes, but to create student futures in excess of our …

The Road To Human Emancipation - The Moral And Political Foundations Of Markets, William Shi

CMC Senior Theses

The thesis aims to provide both a real public ideology and the legal and socioeconomic structures to realize Karl Marx’s ideal of human emancipation. Marx argues that in capitalist society, the legal and political superstructure forces the ruling class to represent its interest as the public interest, which legitimizes the massive inequality in resources and social power. To demonstrate how to realize the substantive public interest, the two parts of the thesis have two goals. The first part aims to formulate a rightful candidate to the public ideology of human emancipation, which represents the substantive public interest rather than the …

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 …

Derrida And Asian Thought, Steven Burik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

More than fifteen years after Jacques Derrida passed away, he remains a controversial figure in philosophy. Much maligned, both when he was alive and after his death, Derrida’s relation to philosophy proper has always been an uneasy one, not least because of his relentless questioning of the notion of “philosophy proper” itself. It is this relentless interrogation of the history and presuppositions of Western philosophy that has made him an attractive figure to comparative philosophy. Many of the authors in this volume, and others beside them, have seen in Derrida a kind of thinking that refuses to play by the …