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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- ItemTruly Seeing Mathematics: An Exploration of Mathematical Aspects through Ability, Skill, and Expertise(2023) Deuber, Lara; Macbeth, DanielleMathematics has been described as a form of synthetic a priori. This paper uses Wittgensteinian aspects to examine the realm of mathematics in ability, skill, and expertise. These categories show different degrees of mathematical comprehension. Aspects are meant to help us “see” meaning under the original concept of an object. This thesis aims to bring examples to light to support my claim that mathematics is not black and white. I hope to show how we can see mathematical aspects as they relate to matching identities, patterns, and constructions to gather a deeper understanding for why there are such differences between levels of mathematical knowledge. As a student continues to develop their mathematical familiarity, they take everything they have acquired from ability to skill to potentially becoming an expert one day. But rather than focusing on a linear relationship between these three categories, I hope to instead give an account of why these are distinct categories.
- ItemLeaps in Perception: Towards a Philosophy of Imaginatively-endowed Perceiving(2023) Rousseau, Jade; Yurdin, JoelInquiry into our perception soon leads us to a kind of skepticism, whereby we not only doubt that our senses give us access to the objective world, we doubt they give us access to anything at all. This is the problem of perception. At the heart of this problem lies a distance between us and the world. Introducing the concept of perceptive faith, I argue that our fundamental attitude towards the world is thus one of leaping. Using the lens of the leap, I first consider the way perception unfolds within us. I emphasize the importance of theorizing perception as a lived perceiving, and suggest that imagination may be necessary for our perceiving, as that which allows us to bridge the gaps and give life to them. I then consider two analytic theories of perception, drawing out their phenomenological sensibility, and suggest that if intentionalism begins to tie the world to us, enactivism embeds us firmly in the world. The distance between the world and us thus seems to be bridged when we realize perception is an embodied and imaginatively-endowed perceiving. I contend that such premises were ignored because of a pervasive optocentrism in Western philosophy, an overvaluation of sight and a devaluation of the other senses (especially of touch) which led certain problems, questions, and conclusions to appear at the expense of others. I conclude that a philosophy of perception that emphasized the imaginary texture of the world would allow us to unproblematically encompass both our being towards and away from the world.