History of Philosophy Commons^™

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

Japanese-English Translation: Nishida Kitarō––“Self-Determination Of The Eternal Now” 「永遠の今の自己限定」、西田幾多郎著（昭和六年七月） (July 1931) §1 Of 4; Complete Draft (Supersedes Draft Of 2 Jan 19); Translated By Christopher Southward; Revision And Expansion Underway, Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Japanese-English Translation: Nishida Kitarō––“Self-Determination of the Eternal Now” (July 1931) 「永遠の今の自己限定」、西田幾多郎著（昭和六年七月）

§1 of 4; Complete Draft (Supersedes Draft of 2 Jan 2019)

Translated from the Japanese by Christopher Southward; Revision and Expansion Underway, October 2023

You Unseen Cathedrals: A Study Of The Conceptual Conditions Of Negativity, Anda Pleniceanu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation addresses a gap in contemporary negativity studies by examining twentieth-century texts that engage with negativity beyond the subject. Starting with the premise that the concepts of negativity and subjectivity are intertwined, I argue that the predominant tendency in scholarship has been to conceptualize subjectivity as a circular structure that incorporates negativity as its dynamic foundation. However, when negativity is defined in subordination to the subjective circle, its radical features are diminished, resulting in “weak negativity.” In Chapter 1, I exemplify my arguments using the works of Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, and Judith Butler. In contrast to weak negativity, …

Illuminating Chinese Aesthetics With Kant’S Account Of Genius? Possibility And Difficulty, Kefu Zhu

Comparative Philosophy

Many scholars interpret Chinese Aesthetics with the Kantian theory of genius because they seem to form a parallel: similar innate and spontaneous mental talents that exceed normal cognition and imagination generates beautiful arts with similar extraordinary qualities. I argue that projecting Kant’s genius to illuminate the creative power analogically, i.e., the carefree-wandering mind, is infeasible. The theory of genius assumes a critical project that stipulates a valuable way to exercise the power of judgment. Genius is only a postulated idea for successfully making aesthetic judgments on artworks. In contrast, the carefree-wandering mind assumes a Daoist metaphysical-ethical theory centering on the …

Inner Song Phenomenological Description Of A Musical Object Of Phantasy, Ellen Moysan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is the phenomenological description of a musical object of phantasy I call “inner song,” i.e., the music that the musician “sings in his or her head” while practicing his or her instrument. It describes the specific inner song of a single musician playing a melodic instrument, and rehearsing in a solipsistic situation. The description is based on three resources: my personal experience as a cellist; the third person experiences of other musicians I have interviewed on that topic since 2010; and the Husserlian corpus. Each chapter starts with excerpts of interviews focusing on specific aspects the inner song. …

Theory Of Knowledge In The Tretise Of Al-Gazali “Al-Kistasu-Lmustakim” (Right Scales), Kodirov Davronbek

The Light of Islam

Today, one of the urgent tasks of the social sciences is the construction of the Third Renaissance in our country, the transfer of the heritage of our ancestors to the younger generation, and their education in the spirit of moral and spiritual ideas based on Islamic philosophy. Therefore, it is important to study and research the sources that underlie the religious and philosophical views that have been formed and consolidated in our country for centuries. One of these philosophical writings is Al-Qistasu-l-Mustakim (Right scales) by Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad alGhazali, a thinker, lawyer, philosopher, and mystic who lived and …

Do Androids Dream Of Improvisation?, Aidan J. Samp

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

How Aesthetics Shape Our Ethics: Exploring Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, And Digital World, Nika Kokhodze

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Every day, we encounter numerous amount of images, films, news and propaganda. The different forms and manifestations of aesthetics haunts our lives daily. What if I told you that Aesthetics has immense amount of power? This project aims specifically at that as it explores authoritarian states and the liberal democracies alike. How could the moral compass that we all cherish and hold dearly be predicated and shaped by something so remote as aesthetics? Exploring through examples from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the digital world we all live in, one might find some answers and the right questions to …

Philosophy And Music: A Search For Truth, Zhengzhou Li

Honors Theses

For early Wittgenstein, and perhaps the early analytic tradition, the scope of philosophy is almost synonymous with the limit of language. The quietist doctrine thus abandons all metaphysical inquiry. In the history of philosophy, some German philosophers around the 19th century showed us how we can arrive at the ontological truth in ways other than with language. For these German philosophers, aesthetics and art are vital tools in searching for truth. In response to the Wittgensteinian quietism and in search of other ways of philosophizing besides through the use of language, my thesis focuses specifically on the art of music …

Difficult Paintings, Hao (Damien) Ding

Theses and Dissertations

The sublime as a concept has a fraught and racist history. However, it remains the single most helpful idea in describing the deeply felt state of being when one comes across something ineffably powerful. From an art-making perspective, this thesis, and the accompanying exhibition of installations and paintings, proposes an alternative construction of the concept of the sublime. Using Lacanian psychoanalysis as a conceptual point of departure, a painter can manipulate the relationship of the viewer and paintings to create paradoxical moments of simultaneous intimacy and distance, which interact to create an alternative path towards the sublime. Through descriptions of …

Duration And Depravity: Religious And Secular Temporality In Puritanism And The American Gothic, Taylor Kraayenbrink

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Duration and Depravity identifies a temporality of “sinful feeling” operating in the archive of Puritan writings of personal piety, such as diaries, autobiographies, conversion narratives, and sermons, and persisting into early American gothic literature. This temporality of sinful feeling is an attempt to discipline the self through temporal projection oriented towards the theological fact and religiously experienced feeling of sinfulness. Duration and Depravity engages with the proliferation of postsecular criticism in American literature studies generally, and Puritan studies more specifically. Postsecular criticism in literary studies is a style of historicism that reconsiders its primary archive’s position in newly complicated narratives …

In And Out Of Character: Socratic Mimēsis, Mateo Duque

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the Republic, Plato has Socrates attack poetry’s use of mimēsis, often translated as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation.’ Various scholars (e.g. Blondell 2002; Frank 2018; Halliwell 2009; K. Morgan 2004) have noticed the tension between Socrates’ theory critical of mimēsis and Plato’s literary practice of speaking through various characters in his dialogues. However, none of these scholars have addressed that it is not only Plato the writer who uses mimēsis but also his own character, Socrates. At crucial moments in several dialogues, Socrates takes on a role and speaks as someone else. I call these moments “Socratic mimēsis.” …

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 …

Courage And Passion In The Reading Of The Later Foucault Of The Cynics, Inmaculada Hoyos Sanchez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article “Courage and Passion in the Reading of the Later Foucault of the Cynics” Inmaculada Hoyos Sánchez aims to determine what role the passions played in the courage of the truth of ancient Cynicism, for which purpose she analyses the lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France in 1984. The hypothesis put forward in this article is that what makes Cynic courage different from other manifestations of the courage of the truth, such as Socratic courage, is that it specifically involves the eradication of shame, a passion that is social and public in character, rather than an …

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 …

Ernst Blochs Utopischer Nietzsche: Von Der Tragödien- Zur Marxismustheorie, Ursula Beata Baur

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ernst Bloch, bekannt als neomarxistischer Querdenker, sieht das utopische und lebensbejahende Potenzial seiner Philosophie bereits in Friedrich Nietzsches Denken angelegt. Dessen widerstreitende, aber sich dennoch komplementär ergänzende Konzepte des „Apollinischen“ und „Dionysischen“ interpretiert und erweitert Bloch für seine Hoffnungslehren. Die Thesis widmet sich der Fragestellung, inwiefern Nietzsches Begriffspaar bei Bloch verstanden und politisiert wird und welcher Mehrwert durch diese Analyse entsteht. Bloch entlehnt von Nietzsche vor allem seine Dionysos-Figur, die er als das rebellierende Subjekt gegen das geschlossene Objektivsystem des Staatsmarxismus seiner Zeit setzt. Dabei vernachlässigt er den anti-individuellen und allvereinenden Aspekt des Dionysischen, eröffnet aber so eine Perspektive auf …

For The Sake Of The Intellect, Let Them Have Art: A Possible Reconciliation For The Value Of Mimetic Arts In The 'Republic', Breanna Liddell

Theses

This paper explores the possibility of a cohesive philosophy that recognizes both Plato’s concern about art as a moral danger in the Republic and the aesthete’s—a worthy adversary—position of art as something worth preserving. Plato understood the arts as mimêsis, or imitative and representational. Additionally, this paper suggests that Plato’s take on art extends beyond the limited realm of the performative arts that depict the misguided actions of Greek heroes and gods and how those arts positively or negatively impact the educational development of a citizen of the Republic. Rather, I assert that what he means by “art” is …

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 …

The Problem Of Evil And The Probity Of Theodicy From William Rowe's Evidential Evidential Of Evil, Olaoluwa Apata

Masters Theses

In this research, we discussed the types of evil: moral and natural, which are cited by atheistic philosophers as evidence against the existence of God. The so-called evidence from evil has been used by the atheistic and other non-theistic scholars to raise hypothesis on evaluating the possibility or likelihood that an omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good God exists in a world that is littered with evil. Moral evil is evil that arise from the misuse of free will by moral agents, while natural evils are natural disasters such as: earthquakes, famine, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes etc. We discussed moral evil and …

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 …

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

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Deleuze Through Wittgenstein: Essays In Transcendental Empiricism, M. Curtis Allen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis undertakes a comparative study of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Ludwig Wittgenstein to elaborate three related problems in what in Deleuze calls ‘transcendental empiricism’. The first chapter deals with the problematic of the dimension of sense in language, and culminates in a concept of the event. The second details the immanence of stupidity within thought and culminates in a practice of showing through silence. The third investigates the consequences of aesthetics for the theory of Ideas, and culminates in the concepts of ‘late intuition’ and of a form of life. Each argues for a new way of broaching …

In The Mood For A Little Dialogue?, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

A Dialogue About Whether or Not to Dialogue

Kierkegaard, Paraphrase, And The Unity Of Form And Content, Antony Aumann

Journal Articles

On one standard view, paraphrasing Kierkegaard requires no special literary talent. It demands no particular flair for the poetic. However, Kierkegaard himself rejects this view. He says we cannot paraphrase in a straightforward fashion some of the ideas he expresses in a literary format. To use the words of Johannes Climacus, these ideas defy direct communication. In this paper, I piece together and defend the justification Kierkegaard offers for this position. I trace its origins to concerns raised by Lessing and Mendelssohn about the relationship between form and content in works of art. I maintain that Kierkegaard follows early German …

Philosophische Figuren, Frauen Und Liebe: Zu Nietzsche Und Lou, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

On Nietzsche’S Judgment Of Style And Hume’S Quixotic Taste: On The Science Of Aesthetics And ‘Playing’ The Satyr, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay reviews Nietzsche’s discussion of scholarly judgments of style beginning with his own inaugural lecture at Basel together with David Hume’s stylistic reflections in Hume's “On the Standard of Taste.” This casts light both on the context and the substance of Nietzsche’s own scholarly concern with the question of style and taste in terms of what Nietzsche called the “science of aesthetics” and consequently of scholarly judgment in both classics (or classical philology, here including archaeology and historiography) and philosophy. I also include a brief discussion of Nietzsche’s phenomenological performance practice of dance or playing the “satyr.”

In The Fullness Of Time: M. M. Bakhtin, In Discourse And In Life, James C. Hall

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The phrase “the fullness of time” touches upon one of M. M. Bakhtin’s most consistently upheld tenets; for Bakhtin, philosophical and everyday utterances rely on their historical embeddedness for the material and concrete reality from which they draw their meaning and through which they are conditioned, inflected, and re-evaluated. In his very last work Bakhtin stated that all meanings are in continuous evolution. In this thesis the attempt will be made to interpret Bakhtin’s corpus by concentrating particularly on the movement of historical and philosophical becoming, the art of responding to philosophy and the events of everyday life, and the …

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

SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations

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 …

Kierkegaard On Indirect Communication, The Crowd, And A Monstrous Illusion, Antony Aumann

Faculty Works

Following the pattern set by the early German Romantics, Kierkegaard conveys many of his insights through literature rather than academic prose. What makes him a valuable member of this tradition is the theory he develops to support it, his so-called “theory of indirect communication.” The most exciting aspect of this theory concerns the alleged importance of indirect communication: Kierkegaard claims that there are some projects only it can accomplish. This paper provides a critical account of two arguments Kierkegaard offers in defense of this claim. The first argument is that he needs to use indirect communication in order to discourage …