Other Philosophy Commons^™

Prison-Breaking From Plato's Cave, Brennan Mcdavid

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

This article examines the philosophical significance of nature (ϕύσις) in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The word is used in the protasis of the conditional clause at 515bc where Socrates proposes to inquire into ‘what the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly would be if in the course of nature (ϕύσϵι) something of this sort should happen to them’. This instance of ‘nature’ has been a matter of philological and philosophical debate, with attention paid principally to the narrow passage of the allegory for reconstructing Plato’s meaning. This article argues from the standpoint of …

Toward A Dialectical Account Of Nature, Georgia Rae Grimm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The protection of nature has been a central aim of environmentalism for well over a century. However, the concept of nature has been subjected to abundant critiques in recent literature, threatening the conceptual tenability of this goal. In this paper, I discuss why I find the concept of nature too valuable to dismiss and offer an account of nature that I believe remedies existent critiques. In Chapter 1, I recount arguments for the protection of nature and illustrate their dualistic underpinnings. In Chapter 2, I discuss issues with dualistic accounts of nature and demonstrate why Steven Vogel’s monistic alternative is …

The Concept Of Myth In Kōsaka Masaaki And Miki Kiyoshi’S Critique, Fernando Wirtz

Comparative Philosophy

This paper explores the concept of myth in two books written by Kōsaka Masaaki, The Historical World (1937) and Philosophy of the Nation (1942). In both, myth appears as a central moment in the transition from primitive to modern societies. The role of myth is closely related to Kōsaka’s notion of nature, since one goal of his reflection is to show how history is supported by the “substratum” of nature. In this sense, he also distinguishes between the natural and historical aspects of nations. After analyzing the subcategories of primordial nature, environmental nature, and historical nature, the paper shows how …

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 …

An Exposition And Analysis Of Kant’S Account Of Sublimity, Paulina Simone Calistru

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I begin by providing an exposition of Kant’s cognitive and phenomenological trajectory during experiences of mathematical and dynamical sublimity. I use this moment of elucidation to highlight certain implications of Kant’s account which reveal a necessary crutch on sublimity’s self-preservationist motivations, concluding realization of the judging subjects as superior to the power intuited and emphasis on the feeling and apprehension of infinity. This skeletal view of Kant’s argument allows for the argument of my three main criticisms: (i) the incoherence of his sublime feeling with other recounted phenomenologies of the experience, (ii) the fallibility of his key premise which states …

The Environmental Imaginations Of Moby-Dick: Technology And Vulnerability In Human/More-Than-Human Relationships, Jensen A. Lillquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the twenty-first century, the relationship between the human and the more-than-human is a problem of massive proportions, as we live in an age of climate change, mass-extinction, over-population, and resource depletion. Evaluating how we have arrived where we are and re-thinking the issues at play as we move forward is crucial for future adaptation of human/more-than-human relationships; this is the primary goal of my analysis of the environmental imaginations of Moby-Dick.

I argue that the four primary environmental imaginations—the providential, the utilitarian, the Romantic, and the ecological—that have influenced United States culture since European settlement are represented by Herman …

Black Lives, Sacred Humanity, And The Racialization Of Nature, Or Why America Needs Religious Naturalism Today, Carol W. White

Faculty Journal Articles

Embedded in persistent representations of people of African descent as inferior beings or subpar humans are problematic notions of animality, race, and nature in the U.S., or a lethal combination of intimately conjoined white supremacy and species supremacy. Confronting these processes is a model of African American religious naturalism, which presupposes human animals’ deep, inextricable homology with each other and with other natural processes. Building on the ideas of Anna J. Cooper, W. E. B. du Bois, and James Baldwin, this model of religious naturalism emphasizes humans as sacred centers of value and distinct movements of nature itself where deep …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

Dionysian Biopolitics: Karl Kerényi’S Concept Of Indestructible Life, Kristóf Fenyvesi

Comparative Philosophy

Scholar of religion Karl Kerényi’s last book, Dionysos, is a grand attempt at reinterpreting ζωη (zoe), the Greek concept of indestructible life, which he distinguishes from βίος (bios), finite life. In Kerényi’s view, the meaning and sensual experience of zoe was expressed in its richest form in the Cretan beginnings of the cult of Dionysos. The major characteristics of this cult, as Kerényi describes, were beyond the cultural, political, and sexual limits of the Christian interpretations of life and nature. Searching for modern analogies to zoe, Kerényi explains the idea in relation to molecular biology’s minimum definition of life. Despite …

Anti-Nature In Nature Itself, Ryōsuke Ōhashi

Comparative Philosophy

Nature and civilization are often regarded in opposition to each other. However, civilization employs technologies and is based on laws of nature. Also, the historical world is a result of the development of the natural world. An “anti-nature” must thus be contained somewhere within nature. The idea of “anti-nature” is neither alien to the Eastern nor to the Western traditional concepts of nature. The philosophy of Lao Zi never embraces mere naturalism. Lao Zi has observed that things in the world are not always “so on their own” but rather in the mode of anti-nature. Anti-nature in nature itself does …

All Or Nothing? Nature In Chinese Thought And The Apophatic Occident, William Franke

Comparative Philosophy

This paper develops an interpretation of nature in classical Chinese culture through dialogue with the work of François Jullien. I understand nature negatively as precisely what never appears as such nor ever can be exactly apprehended and defined. For perception and expression entail inevitably human mediation and cultural transmission by semiotic and hermeneutic means that distort and occult the natural in the full depth of its alterity. My claim is that the largely negative approach to nature that Jullien finds in sources of Chinese tradition can also be found in the West, particularly in its apophatic currents or countercurrents that …

On The Order Of The Real: Nietzsche And Lacan, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.