Browsing by Author "Mason, Qrescent Mali"
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- ItemCoping with Mortality: an argument for a stoic lifestyle(2023) Walker, Khalil Ayele; Mason, Qrescent MaliThis text discusses the difficulty of coping with death and mortality, and how Stoicism can provide a practical approach to dealing with these issues. Stoicism is a philosophy that aims to help individuals live a life of inner peace and tranquility by cultivating virtues such as wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. The Stoics believe that happiness is found in our ability to control our thoughts and emotions and live by reason and purposeful lives. By accepting the natural order of life and death, individuals can focus on living fulfilled lives and achieving inner peace. Stoicism offers a practical and rational approach to dealing with death, in promoting resilience and personal growth.
- ItemIs Beauty Truth and Truth Beauty? Beauty, Style, and Felt Knowledge in Philosophical Writing(2022) Fiscarelli-Mintz, Anna; Berger, Benjamin (Professor of philosophy); Mason, Qrescent MaliBeauty is often considered to have no serious place in philosophy—at best a mere ornament and at worst the indication of poor or even dangerous philosophical writing. This designation is also often weaponized against philosophers whose writing style takes non-traditional forms, forcing them to justify their philosophy (and all too often themselves as philosophers) against a distinctly un-diverse canon of traditional philosophical writing, thus robbing the field of valuable philosophers and philosophy itself from the power and insight of their work, not to mention making the field a far more difficult environment for those who Kristie Dotson calls "diverse practitioners" of philosophy. In this thesis, I will examine the role of beauty in philosophical writing by focusing on the work of feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed. I will examine how style functions in Ahmed's writing, evaluate how existing arguments surrounding style in philosophical writing might account for the effectiveness of Ahmed's work, and posit my own argument as to how beautiful writing allows for a different kind of access to truth through felt knowledge.
- ItemTrue Solidarity and bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy(2023) Wang, Yufan; Mason, Qrescent MaliHuge inequalities exist in the U.S. K-12 and higher education systems, which further widen the achievement gap between classes and races. In addition to the quantitative studies that reveal the deficiency of social mobility, I want to examine the role of education in perpetuating oppression in various forms. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues that the banking concept of education as a tool of oppression prevents the oppressed from developing a critical consciousness about their nature of being oppressed and makes them more submissive and subordinate to the dominant values (47). While Freire's work is primarily focused on developing a pedagogy with the oppressed to regain their humanity and liberation, I argue the privileged students should be included in critical pedagogy, not only because a fundamental change in exploitation and oppression needs them to engage in the movement, but also because banking education prevents them from building true solidarity with the oppressed and engaging the liberation struggle meaningfully. In addition, true solidarity in Freire’s mind is an act of love and a praxis that requires reflection and action. Therefore, if we want to build true solidarity between the oppressors and the oppressed, we must abandon the existing banking education and adopt bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy, which emphasize well-being, healing, love, respect, and equity.
- ItemUnhappy Solutions: Enduring the Cycle of Institutional Violence From 1972 to the Bi-Co Strike(2021) Woo, Kylie; Mason, Qrescent MaliWalter Benjamin highlights two kinds of violence, mythic and divine, in his Critique of Violence, which sets up a foundation to further explore how linear temporality affects our recognition of violence. Looking at the insurmountable violence that people of color have endured over the past year, from COVID-19 Asian hate-crimes to the murders of Black, unarmed men and women, this thesis explores how we recognize and solve violence according to a linear temporality. However, I argue that this systemic and institutional violence is actually a cycle that must be solved with non-linear solutions, since violence can only recognize itself, an idea stemming from Frantz Fanon. Inspired by Sarah Ahmed, I argue that unhappiness is a non-linear solution that might help to recognize violence as a cycle, therefore alleviate it accordingly. The Bi-Co Strike serves as a personal and philosophical example of how institutional violence is a cycle, as the 1972 Strike at Haverford College highlights the repetitive nature of violence demonstrating that linear solutions do not work. This thesis is an acknowledgement of my own frustration, confusion, and complicity in orienting myself towards the future and towards happiness. This thesis is not a critique of the legal system and the violence that we have endured over the past year, but is a critique of our orientation towards order, towards clarity, to change, and (un)happiness.
- Item“What Is More Wonderful?”: Existential Violence, Gender, Freedom, and Erotic Love beyond Levinasian Ethics(2024) Khanna, Bela; Mason, Qrescent MaliEmmanuel Levinas famously declared that love is the negation of ethical society, that love constitutes a collapse of the ethical constraints and demands that the face of the Other makes upon the Self. This project takes his claim as a starting point for examining the socially contingent factors that distinguish what I term the romantic-erotic face-to-face, between lovers, from the social-ethical face-to-face, between Levinasian neighbors. If we take Levinas’s and Beauvoir’s notion that transcendence and self- actualization are promised to us in the face of the Other, then something has gone wrong if we simultaneously believe that a love relation, which delivers heightened proximity to the Other, is the negation of the possibility for self-realization. First, I will examine the (self-)destructive dynamics that contribute to ethical amputation in romantic-erotic encounters, looking at both gender and romantic love through a cross-analysis of heterosexual relationships. Next, I will argue that the mutilated woman, whose free, transcendent subjectivity is obscured by sociopolitically contingent factors, becomes assimilable into the masculine in love relations. By becoming all-object or less-than-object via objectification, abjection, mystification, and other forms of what I am calling “existential violence,” women and feminized individuals are rendered partial and thus are able to be possessed, without concerns of justice, by the masculine Other, who is positioned as the Same—indeed, as the Only. This conclusion leads us to the third and final section of this project, which takes Sylvia Plath’s “undesirable impossibility” of fusion as a jumping-off point for imagining an “ethical love” that transcends the social factors that lead to existential violence. I aim in this final section to synthesize the imaginative claims of Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Sylvia Plath, and several other writers about love into a complete picture of an ethical love, free from othering and objectification, as an invaluable tool for self-actualization. I hope to dispel the notion that we must choose between justice and love and propose rather that love is a particular, privileged form of sociality that surpasses ethics into a mutual obligation to not only respect, but to actively take up the existential adventure of the Other in a fluid, trusting balance.