Philosophy Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2041

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon Philosophy Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Open Access
A Critical Feminist Semiology: De-naturalizing and Re-Politicizing Patriarchal, White Supremacist, and Settler-Colonial Systems of Meaning
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Ring, Annalee; Stawarska, Beata
This dissertation de-naturalizes and re-politicizes patriarchal, white supremacist and settler-colonial systems of meaning through creating a methodology of critical feminist semiology. This methodology is built from the contributions of many thinkers’ works in semiology, phenomenology, philosophy of myth, feminist philosophy, and critical philosophy of race. I return to the emergence of semiology in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work to show that it has been more political than the dominant reading takes semiology to be. My reading of his work emphasizes the importance of studying politics, history, institutions, colonialism, and geography in the study of signs as a part of social life. I critique Roland Barthes for depoliticizing the method of semiology while acknowledging his many contributions, especially in the study of myths. Barthes’ emphasis on the operation of myths to naturalize and depoliticize politically motivated contingencies is a major contribution to the method of critical feminist semiology. This project turns to Simone de Beauvoir’s work The Second Sex and reads it as a semiological phenomenology. Beauvoir’s work closely considers signs as a part of social life through demonstrating the contingency of the myth of the eternal feminine as well as its political, economic, social, and ontological operations. She shows how this myth shapes lived experiences and how it might be resisted. This chapter demonstrates that the myth of the eternal feminine operates as a part of a patriarchal system of meaning. The dissertation then turns to the field of Black feminist thought, which considers how myths sustain and reinforce race and gender oppression in a more collective manner than the semiologists previously considered. This chapter identifies clusters of myths that support one another and that support what I call the meta-myth of white supremacy. White supremacy is both a singular myth and a meta-myth that is supported by clusters of myths. To dismantle the meta-myth of white supremacy, it is vital to understand how it is supported by and supports clusters of myths; that is, treating it as an individual myth is insufficient. This dissertation then engages with Indigenous and decolonial scholars to show how clusters of myth sustain settler colonialism. The cluster of myths considered in this chapter also supports the meta-myth of white supremacy. Decolonial scholars demonstrate the importance of purging mythologies that contribute to the material success of settler-colonialism. Throughout the dissertation, myths are considered material; rather than treated as abstractions alone, myths have significant impacts on material conditions and as such should be given moral scrutiny.
Open Access
Academics No Longer Think: How the Neoliberalization of Academia Leads to Thoughtlessness
(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23) Pack, Justin; Mann, Bonnie
In my dissertation, I argue that the neoliberalization of higher education results in the university becoming less and less a place of wonder, self-cultivation and thinking and instead more and more a place to specialize, strategize and produce. This is a result of the volatile infusion and mixing of the logic of calculative rationality at work in consumer capitalism with the logic of scientific instrumental rationality already hegemonic in academia. This adds to the demands of the academic world of production the demands of the world of consumption. Now the academic (and also the student) is interpellated not only as a producer of knowledge but also as an object of consumption (to be consumed by others). These new pressures, previously kept at a distance from academia, explosively accelerate the already rapid process of rationalization of which science is already a key part and increasingly structure higher education as a field of strategic action in which students no longer have the time to think and to develop good judgment. I worry this undermines the opportunity for students to develop into good citizens that can truly think critically and judge carefully. Thinking and judgment are, according to Arendt, the only things that can save us if the powerful machines of science or capitalism begin to work in ways they should not. Arendt saw Nazi Germany use the newest science and the best economic management to systematically kill six million Jews. She saw the disturbing inability of the populace and the intellectuals to capably resist the Nazi machine once it got rolling. I argue than unless checked, neoliberalization threatens to turn the university into a place that discourages thinking and the development of judgment in favor of hyperspecialization and strategic action.
Open Access
An Argument for a Cartographic Approach to Technology
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) McLevey, Mare; Morar, Nicolae
This dissertation develops a way to study technology and politics that is an alternative to dominant approaches particular to contemporary philosophy of technology’s empirical and ethical turns. Dominant models fix technologies as stable objects to be related to in ethical ways or as objects whose designs should be reformed over time. Alternatively, I develop what I call a cartographic approach to technology (CAT). CAT situates technologies as components of larger dynamic ensembles the transformations of which must be diagrammed and mapped. The cartographic task is not simply to describe existing relations; it involves the creation of new assemblages through the experimental construction of maps linking technologies with other forces and elements in the wholes of which they are a part. I argue CAT underscores how technological objects themselves are the products of multi-scalar processes of arrangement. Furthermore, these processes are always political and might be points of intervention at any and every moment. CAT throws technologies back into the ensembles enmeshing them and forces productive links between heterogeneous elements. This linking work might carry libidinal, material, psychic, structural, and other types of weight in the real. And it should be undertaken with a view to the production of new cartographies. My argument unfolds across four chapters. In Chapter 2, I develop four tenets of CAT drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s analytic focus on transformations and their concepts of machines, assemblages, and cartography. I illustrate these tenets in Chapters 3 and 4 through comparative studies of CAT alongside Postphenomenology and Critical Theory of Technology, respectively. In Chapter 5, I propose that collective counter-mapping projects such as those of the Counter-Cartographies Collective and Iconoclasistas suggest concrete possibilities for CAT as a site of collective knowledge production about technology. All four chapters together outline an image of philosophy of technology as experimental, creative, collective, and guided by explicit political commitments.
Open Access
Between Performance and Participation: The Time of Action in Hannah Arendt
(University of Oregon, 2014-06-17) Lipkind, Hanna; Mann, Bonnie
This thesis takes up the debate between the agonal and deliberative interpretations of Hannah Arendt's conception of political action. In it, I redeem the model of action as performance found in her descriptions of agonal politics and pull emphasis away from the deliberative model of communicative action on the basis of Arendt's ontology of temporality and her account of the witnessing and judging spectatorship that preserves the meaningfulness of human events against oblivion. I find the danger of this loss of meaning accounted for by the agonal model in the syncopated relationship between spectator and actor. The deliberative model of communicative action, however, collapses the roles of actor and spectator into the uniform role of participant and replaces experiential grounds of legitimacy with atemporal rational grounds. Communicative action is unable to account for the public realm as a space of endurance and skirts the ontological stakes of Arendt's agonal politics.
Open Access
Can We Diagnose the Health of Ecosystems?
(University of Oregon, 1995-06) Dewberry, Thomas Charles
This study is a philosophical examination of the question, "Can we diagnose the health of ecosystems?" Two senses of this question are investigated: 1) Are ecosystems the kind of entities to which "health" applies? 2) Assuming that ecosystem health is a coherent concept, how do we diagnose the health of ecosystems? This study begins with a distinction, first made by Michael Polanyi, between machines and holistic inanimate objects, such as thunderstorms. Thunderstorms are reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics, while machines are not Machines have two levels of control, the laws of physics and chemistry, and operational principles, which harness the parts to achieve the purpose of the machine. The importance of this distinction is that the concept of health only applies to objects which have two or more levels of control. This study concludes that the concept of health applies to ecosystems. Ecosystems are not reducible to their parts. The diagnosis of ecosystem health is similar to a medical doctor diagnosing the health of a patient, because ecosystems and humans are both members of the class of objects to which "health" applies. The diagnostician, with each specimen observed, simultaneously modifies the standard of normality for the class of object, at the same time the individual is appraised according to the standard. Diagnosing the health of a patient is a skill which cannot be reduced to an objective measurable standard. However, ecosystem are not individuals, so diagnosing the health of ecosystems is not exactly analogous to diagnosing the health of a human or horse. This study has important implications for resource management and policy. Procedures, such as the federal interagency watershed analysis, which are built on a hierarchical theory based on the rate of processes, make ecosystem health incoherent. The federal strategy appears to hold the implicit assumption that ecosystems are reducible to their parts. Watershed analysis is also an ambiguous procedure at best. It rejects the medical model, and it may destroy the skill of diagnosis, by attempting to replace it with a measurable standard.
Open Access
The Cassandra Complex: On Violence, Racism, and Mourning
(University of Oregon, 2012) Frankowski, Alfred; Frankowski, Alfred; Zack, Naomi
The Cassandra Complex is a work in the traditions of critical philosophy and psychoanalysis. In The Cassandra Complex, I examine the intersection of violence, racism, and mourning. I hold that analysis of this intersection gives birth to a critical view on the politics of memory and the politics of racism as it operates in its most discreet forms. What makes violence discreet is that it escapes identity or is continually misidentified. I call that structure of violence that escapes being identified as such "White violence" and argue that this structure of violence undermines our normative ways of addressing racist violence in the present. This creates a continual social pattern of misidentification, mistaken memory, and mistaken practices of thinking about the violence of racism, both past and present. The present form of this misidentification could be called post-raciality, but it is specific to how we understand and remember our own history of anti-Black violence. I argue that post-racial memory produces memory only to facilitate forgetting and thus is only seen as a social pathology in the public sphere. The term "Cassandra Complex" provides an identity for the type of social pathology that appears at the critical edge of political discursivity. From the analysis of this social pathology, I argue that aesthetic sorrow, allegorical memory, and a sublime sense of mourning disrupt the normative functioning of the social pathology. Indeed, I argue that aesthetic sorrow makes the present strange by making the politically unbearable aesthetically unrepresentable. This sense of loss constitutes its own history, appearing first as an aesthetics of anesthesia, then as a memory that is also an amnesia. Thus, I hold that a robust notion of allegory that can be translated into the public sphere as a way of exposing the degenerative effects of post-racial memory. Moreover, I hold that allegory allows for a social analysis of those political conditions that make public that which has gone silent. I argue that an understanding of the political significance of that continual movement of silence is the task of understanding the present form of violence in the post-racial.
Open Access
Causal Skepticism and the Destruction of Antiquity
(University of Oregon, 2011-12) Jordan, Jason M.
This dissertation examines the development of skeptical views concerning causation from the medieval to the early modern period. While causal skepticism is often overlooked by intellectual historians, I argue that, in spite of its typical motivation as a religious response to shibboleths of ancient philosophy that stood askance from the dogmas of Abrahamic theology, causal skepticism was the greatest intellectual development of post-antiquity and ultimately culminated into modern Science. The first chapter examines Hume's famous analysis of causation and serves as a foil for the prior history of causal skepticism addressed in the subsequent chapters. The second chapter addresses the dispute over causation in medieval Islamic philosophy. I argue that virtually the entirety of Hume's analysis was anticipated, and in some cases superseded, by al-Ghazali in the eleventh century. The third chapter examines Averroes' critique of al-Ghazali, as well as the development of Aristotelian causal metaphysics in the Christian West. The fourth chapter concerns the development of the nominalist tradition skeptical attitude towards efficient causal explanation in the aftermath of the anti-Aristotelian condemnations of 1277. The fifth chapter addresses the Cartesian occasionalist tradition and its skeptical stance on secondary causation and the relation between this causal skepticism and central doctrines of Cartesian physics and metaphysics. The sixth and final chapter of my dissertation concerns the collapse of occasionalism and its many offspring. My ultimate thesis is that the hallmarks of both modern philosophy and modern science trace their origin to the failure of occasionalism to resolve its own internal contradictions.
Open Access
The claim of language: A phenomenological approach
(University of Oregon, 2010-06) Culbertson, Carolyn Sue, 1982-
This dissertation develops an interpretation of Martin Heidegger's philosophical project in On the Way to Language and some of his earlier works that pave the way for this text and offers criticism of Heidegger's project in light of this interpretation. On the Way to Language stands apart from most twentieth century philosophy in arguing that, although human beings are within language in one sense, our relationship to language is nevertheless an estranged one. Heidegger often describes this condition as "lacking the word for the word." Because we are constantly speaking, we rarely if ever stop to wonder about the nature of language itself. Heidegger calls this our "entanglement" within language, a concept rooted in Being and Time 's exposition of the human being's thrownness. Read in terms of language, thrownness describes how we inherit concepts and find ourselves entangled in words prior to our reflection upon them. Heidegger presents what motivates us to bring the word to word in two ways. First, this need is rooted in the human being's fundamental structure of thrownness. Second, the need makes itself manifest through translation. My reading expands upon these two explanations of how we come to experience this entanglement, arguing that everyday communication regularly offers such experiences and demands that we modify, therefore temporarily distancing ourselves from, given language inheritances. The dissertation employs three other theorists, Roman Jakobson, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva, to flesh out how this need naturally arises in ordinary language development. Though he underestimates the extent to which everyday communicative situations require ongoing transformations of ordinary language, Heidegger nevertheless considers social encounters to be an important vehicle for language transformation. In this way, the goal of bringing our thrownness into language to word is not to disentangle ourselves from social relations, as some commentators have suggested. The last chapter shows how Paul Celan's poetics, in its inheritance of Heidegger's project, expands upon the role of social relations in language entanglement.
Open Access
Co-Speech Gesture in Communication and Cognition
(University of Oregon, 2011-12) Cuffari, Elena Clare
This dissertation stages a reciprocal critique between traditional and marginal philosophical approaches to language on the one hand and interdisciplinary studies of speech-accompanying hand gestures on the other. Gesturing with the hands while speaking is a ubiquitous, cross-cultural human practice. Yet this practice is complex, varied, conventional, nonconventional, and above all under-theorized. In light of the theoretical and empirical treatments of language and gesture that I engage in, I argue that the hand gestures that spontaneously accompany speech are a part of language; more specifically, they are enactments of linguistic meaning. They are simultaneously (acts of) cognition and communication. Human communication and cognition are what they are in part because of this practice of gesturing. This argument has profound implications for philosophy, for gesture studies, and for interdisciplinary work to come. As further, strong proof of the pervasively embodied way that humans make meaning in language, reflection on gestural phenomena calls for a complete re-orientation in traditional analytic philosophy of language. Yet philosophical awareness of intersubjectivity and normativity as conditions of meaning achievement is well-deployed in elaborating and refining the minimal theoretical apparatus of present-day gesture studies. Triangulating between the most social, communicative philosophies of meaning and the most nuanced, reflective treatments of co-speech hand gesture, I articulate a new construal of language as embodied, world-embedded, intersubjectively normative, dynamic, multi-modal enacting of appropriative disclosure. Spontaneous co-speech gestures, while being indeed spontaneous, are nonetheless informed in various ways by conventions that they appropriate and deploy. Through this appropriation and deployment speakers enact, rather than represent, meaning, and they do so in various linguistic modalities. Seen thusly, gestures provide philosophers with a unique new perspective on the paradoxical determined-yet-free nature of all human meaning.
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Communal Agency in Josiah Royce
(University of Oregon, 2012) Jacobs, Matthew; Jacobs, Matthew; Pratt, Scott
On the common sense view, an agent is an individual. Communities are collections of individuals, but the community itself is not understood to possess a collective, unified agency. Nevertheless, this view stands at odds with frequent ascriptions of communal agency; e.g., "Oregonians are environmentally conscious," "The team played to win," "The LGBTQ community is pro-gay marriage." If we are to vindicate such ascriptions, we need a theory of the "reality of community," the thesis that under certain conditions, a community possesses a unified, collective agency. This work reconstructs Royce's theory of communal agency through his views of purposiveness and the use he makes of C.S. Peirce's "theory of interpretation." I argue that, for Royce, agency is purposiveness and purposiveness always bears the triadic structure of the process of interpretation. Thus, the process of interpretation entails agency whether at the level of the individual or at the level of the community.
Open Access
Creative Climate: East-West Perspectives on Art, Nature, and the Expressive Body
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Schultz, Lucy; Toadvine, Ted
This dissertation defends the need for a renewed conception of nature as seen through the lens of an artist. By exploring how the relationship between art and nature has been conceived by 19th and 20th century European and Japanese philosophers (including Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Nishida, and Watsuji), I offer a way of thinking about artistic expression that recognizes the active, expressive character of artistic media and, more broadly, nature itself. Through an analysis of the embodied foundations of artistic creation, I develop a non-subjectivist account of expression that incorporates the climatic milieu. I maintain that the continuity between the embodied self and its life-world implies that the origin of creativity exceeds the will of the individual. This, in turn, implies that nature and the material on which art draws are expressive. According to this view, nature is not an indifferent realm of "mere" material and chemical processes distinct from the domain of culture and meaning. Rather, it is a creative climate from which the artist draws and to which the artist contributes. In conclusion, I maintain that this view has the potential to inform a more sustainable and ethically sound attitude towards the natural world.
Open Access
Critical Phenomenology of Illness: Towards a Politics of Care
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) McLay , Sarah; Stawarska, Beata
Working at the intersection of phenomenology and critical disability studies, this dissertation develops a critical phenomenology of illness and health. Moving beyond classical phenomenologies of illness—which center on the first-person experience of a consciousness abstracted from social and historical structures—I argue that responsibly examining illness (and health) demands concretely attending to the ways that particular illness experiences are instituted from within a socio-historical field. Importantly, beyond describing the lived experience of illness, critical phenomenology must track the material-historical structures and norms that foreclose possibilities for coping and living with illness. This involves reckoning with how oppressive structures—in disproportionate ways—debilitate bodies and make them sick. When we do this work, it becomes clear that we must broaden the scope of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) call for “an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” (167). That is, given that phenomenology can’t extract itself from the natural attitude, and given that natural attitudes are implicitly shaped by debilitating structures of oppression, if phenomenology demands rehabilitation, then rehabilitation can’t just take place at the theoretical level. Instead, a radically responsible phenomenology of health/illness demands that we work towards dismantling debilitating systems, and creating a world where all bodies might flourish.
Open Access
Decolonizing Silences: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Deep Silences with Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Ferrari, Martina; Stawarska, Beata
Motivating this dissertation is a concern for how Western philosophical, cultural, and political practices tend to privilege speech and voice as emancipatory tools and reduce silence to silencing. To locate power in silence and not exclusively in speech and voice, the dissertation grapples with the normative implications of coloniality vis-à-vis the phenomenon of silence at both the theoretical and sensible levels; it investigates how modern/colonial assumptions affect Western understandings of the phenomenon of silence and eventuate modalities of existence that preclude hearing the polyvocality of silences. To press Western culture beyond its negative affinities with “silence,” I develop and defend the concept of “deep silence.” Unlike “silencing,” which is understood as the opposite of speech and signification and, as such, as a matter of an already available utterance being smothered or unspoken, “deep silence” indicates a transformative power that generates meanings that have not yet been voiced and that, importantly, breaks with colonial norms and expectations. Deep silences, I argue, can be a powerful decolonizing tool.The main interlocutors of the dissertation are Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For these authors, silence is not the opposite of speech, or a matter of an already available utterance being smothered or intentionally withheld. Rather, it plays a central role in giving human beings sensible access to the world. Both thinkers, moreover, appeal to the aesthetic to express the otherwise-elusive senses of silence. Working closely with Anzaldúa’s decolonial mythopoetics and Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic and ontological writings, I propose that the modality whereby one bears witness to experiences of marginalization matters to decolonizing endeavors. Mobilizing, rather than eliding, deep silences in one’s account decenters key assumption of Western thinking, opening onto modalities of healing often overlooked by Western legalism and Transitional Justice initiatives; it makes “visible” colonial historias without capitulating to specularization, i.e., rendering experiences of coloniality specular to and readily available for dissection and inspection by the colonizing gaze. My project thus not only offers a critique of discursive approaches to emancipation; it also provides a philosophically rich contribution to current debates about decolonizing methodologies and sense-making.
Open Access
Dehumanization and the Metaphysics of Genocide: A New Theory for Genocide Prevention
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Eichler, Lauren; Pratt, Scott
I argue that dehumanization is a necessary condition of modern genocide, and that preventing dehumanization should be part of efforts to prevent genocide. Unlike other scholarship that addresses this issue, I hold that attending to the moral status and role of nonhuman animals in the process of dehumanization is integral to this effort. Throughout the history of Western philosophy, nonhuman animals have been used to define the human and, in dehumanization, provide the excuse for one group of humans to do violence to another. The absence of a concern for nonhuman animals from both dehumanization and genocide literature generally speaking needs to be rectified if new solutions for these problems are to be developed. Dehumanization is typically treated as an epistemological problem in which one person or group fails to recognize the humanity of the Other, taking the Other to be a subhuman animal. However, I hold that dehumanization and, subsequently, genocide, are possible because of the metaphysical commitments that render humans and nonhumans as fundamentally different and possessing of different moral and ontological statuses. I point to three metaphysical principles widely accepted within Western thought and culture that contribute to the logic of dehumanization: essentialism, purity, and human exceptionalism. I argue that these principles must be re-evaluated and eventually discarded. Current solutions to dehumanization such as rehumanization and human rights function within this metaphysical framework, maintaining an essential distinction between humans and other animals while retaining the notion that the human is superior to the animal. In response, I contend that we need a different set of metaphysical principles on which to base a practice of ethics and politics that would challenge this human/animal dualism, thereby significantly reducing the possibility of dehumanization and genocide as we know it. To do this, I draw on three metaphysical principles of Native American philosophy: diversity, relatedness, and nonhuman liveliness. I argue that the values of respect, recognition, reciprocity, and consent, which are present in Native American philosophies, stories, and pedagogies, can provide the basis for an ethics of relationality that affirms difference and nonhuman agency rather than sameness and human exceptionalism.
Open Access
Democracy in Spite of the Demos: Arendt, the Democratic Turn, and Critical Theory
(University of Oregon, 2019-04-30) Busk, Larry; Zambrana, Rocio
This dissertation examines the limits of the figure of democracy as a critical category in contemporary political philosophy. I frame the analysis around a structural tension in the work of several authors who rely on democracy as a theoretical foundation, which I call “the elitist-populist ambivalence.” This theoretical tendency regards democracy as a categorical imperative—a foundational normative principle and an end in itself—but simultaneously delimits the composition of the demos by disqualifying certain political actors from the status of the political, thereby violating the parameters of a categorical imperative by specifying conditions. In other words, the democratic turn appeals to formal concepts but decides the political content in advance. It advocates democracy on its own terms, democracy in spite of the demos. But if democracy has normative purchase only under certain conditions, then our critical political theory must be based on these conditions rather than the figure of democracy. The project focuses on three main bodies of literature: the work of Hannah Arendt, the tradition of radical democracy (exemplified by Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau), and early Frankfurt School critical theory (Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse). Though Arendt betrays no particular attachment to the term “democracy,” her work is of interest to this project because it represents a stark expression of the elitist-populist ambivalence: a political ontology based on democratic iconography and a simultaneous delimitation of who should count as the demos. The discussion of Rancière, Mouffe, and Laclau explores the ways in which these figures reproduce not only Arendt’s democratic motifs but also her constitutive exclusion. Albeit with divergent political commitments, they both appeal to democracy in spite of the demos. Finally, Adorno and Marcuse provide an alternative to the categorical imperative of democracy. By critically confronting the social mediations of pervasive popular ignorance and irrationality, the early Frankfurt School displaces the normative force of the figure of democracy by a critique of the actually existing demos. This critique, I argue, allows us to steer a theoretical course between the perils of elitism and the equivocations of populism.
Open Access
Demystifying Racial Monopoly
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Haller, Reese; Russell, Camisha
Through analysis of private, public, and state reactions to the Great Depression and northward black migration, this thesis demystifies four key functions of race constitutive of capitalist racial monopoly: historical availability, division of labor, motivation of surplus absorption, and embodiment of false consciousness. Nonetheless, the working class’s immanent limitations and transcendent activities in this paradigm later gave rise to the 1950s and 60s racial liberation movement’s social constructionist critiques. The following counterintelligence reactions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation neutralized, abstracted, and mystified such racial politics, rendering their truncated identarian form available to a variety of political groups from the anti-racist left to the ethnonationalist right. In this way, capital now appropriates resistant racial politics as part of a commodified and mutually antagonistic multiracial plurality. To resuscitate multiracial coalitional politics that can challenge capital’s racial monopoly, today’s anti-racism must reassess the historical development of racial monopoly in the mid-twentieth century.
Open Access
The Echo of God's Laughter: Aesthetic Experience and the Virtue of Openness within a Pragmatist Ethics
(University of Oregon, 2014-09-29) Rodriguez, Aaron; Johnson, Mark
Immanuel Kant's claim that morality is a matter of rational judgment is perhaps the apotheosis of a tradition within ethical philosophy that sought certainty with regards to how one ought to live or what one should to do in any given situation. Although this strand still lingers in various guises in contemporary moral philosophy, pragmatism has set itself up as a response to this quest for ethical certainty. Yet, with its anti-absolutist commitments, pragmatist approaches to ethics struggle with the articulation of a prescriptive moral philosophy. Virtue ethics, however, with its focus on the general dispositions of agents, suggests itself as a viable model for a normative pragmatist moral theory. Moreover, in moving away from the view that moral progress is a form of knowledge-acquisition, pragmatist ethics opens the door for a host of possible influences for our ethical development. In this dissertation, I argue that aesthetic experience, as elicited by the work of art, can significantly inform our ethical lives by cultivating in us what I consider to be the cardinal pragmatist virtue, openness. For, not only does this disposition, which John Dewey describes as a “hospitality towards the new” and a “willingness to be affected by experience,” prove salutary in regards to the pursuits of individual flourishing and social melioration, but one can also construct a system of norms and values upon it while not contradicting pragmatism's anti-absolutist commitments. Engagements with art can help foster this virtue, I argue, because the work of art helps unsettle the conceptual systems of interpretation we often over-rely on in moral inquiry, and thus expands our horizons of possibility for human meaning and action.
Open Access
Educating for the Future: A Freirean Response to Accountability in Higher Education
(University of Oregon, 2010-12) Thomson, Andrew James, 1985-
The system of higher education in the United States suffers from deficits in several generally agreed-upon categories, including affordability, access, effectiveness of teaching and learning, and usefulness of degrees awarded. Many recommended reforms, particularly those from mainstream sources, are problematic, however. Paulo Freire's philosophy of liberatory education is a valuable source for addressing this issue. His discussion of the banking system of education provides a useful lens through which to analyze some of the problems with the current system as well as many recommended reforms, particularly calls for greater accountability for student learning. The problem-posing method of education that Freire advocates as a solution to the banking system, in turn, offers a valuable model to draw upon in the attempt to propose an effective solution to problems in higher education in the US. I apply Freire's philosophy to the 2006 report by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
Open Access
Educational Praxis in Plato and Aristotle
(University of Oregon, 2007-12) Emmick, Christopher, 1980-
Philosophy of education should be unfolded alongside a deep understanding of how critical thinking transforms the student/teacher relation as a form of philosophic praxis. This account primarily draws on the philosophic works of Plato and Aristotle, but also engages a variety of contemporary thinkers on the question of education as philosophically transformative critical thinking. The dialogic structure of Plato's Republic demonstrates the relation between character and logos in a way that shows learning as praxis in self-realization. Aristotle's inquiry into psuche provides understanding and language for the inner life ofa learner that is both active and complex. I argue that, in its most basic formulation, critical thinking names a process that allows students to harness their voice and mature in the classroom while also presenting teachers with the ability to participate in the active learning of their teaching environment.
Open Access
Embodiment and Agency: The Concept of Growth in John Dewey's Philosophy of Education
(University of Oregon, 2012) Caldwell, Elizabeth; Caldwell, Elizabeth; Pratt, Scott
This project takes up recent literature exploring intersections between embodiment theory and education research. I bring these literatures together around an interpretation of the concept of growth from John Dewey's work on education, as I argue that this widely debated idea represents a particularly rich concept with respect to this intersection of theory. I interpret his concept of growth as a concept regarding human agency, which I claim is a thoroughly embodied and felt phenomenon (as opposed to a purely rational capacity). In this interpretation, I follow Dewey in claiming that growth is a valuable educational goal, arguing that when read as embodied agency, the concept of growth can be a helpful focus for encouraging the cultivation of students' felt experiences of agency. The project begins by taking up Dewey and his work in the philosophy of education, emphasizing his definition of education as the reconstruction of experience and the ideal of growth as it relates to this reconstruction. I outline Dewey's conceptions of experience as well as his ideas regarding the self, the body-mind, and the relationship between habit and self-constitution. While I claim that Dewey's work offers a rich framework in which to think about growth, agency, and education, I then look to two alternate philosophical perspectives in supplementing his conception of the embodied self. First, I take up the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in describing how his phenomenological perspective articulates a method for careful, first-person testimony regarding embodied experience, as this supplements Dewey's view by focusing thematically on how embodied agency is felt and experienced. Second, I take up the work of Michel Foucault in describing how his postmodern perspective articulates a method for deconstructing the social conditions that create contemporary, disciplinary body-subjects, as well as how his later work emphasizes care of the self, projects of self-transformation, and practices of freedom. These thinkers, I argue, can further Dewey's emphasis on growth by providing resources regarding transformation as the unending process of self-creation, exploration, and the expansion of possibilities, which buttress Dewey's idea of growth when interpreted as embodied agency.