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This thesis is an exercise in the retrieval of a critique of the moral language of rights. Grounded in her account of moral agency and her analysis of force, Simone Weil's critique of rights language goes beyond, although it contains, the Marxist view of rights language as ideological, as masking power relations. Weil argued not only that humans are unable to extract themselves from social and economic relations in order to appear equal on the political level, but also they are unable to extract themselves from the consequences of force. The thesis clarifies the Weilian appeal to examine in detail the consequences of force as a precondition to justice. Failure to conduct such an examination Weil views as a flight from reality, a consolation. Weil argued that facing the consequences of force is a virtue and requires the exercise of attention, a pivotal concept of her paradigm of renunciation. Weil's ethical category of affliction represents the psycho-social dimensions of extreme forms of victimization. Weil distinguished three objects of violation that compose reification: the body, self-interpretation and relatedness. The capacity to articulate, Weil argues, is impaired by practices which result in affliction. The recognition of muteness engenders understanding of the depth of violation. The impact of the muteness of the afflicted on the public sphere, discourse, and conceptions of justice is disclosed by the ethical category of affliction. The category of affliction discloses, not the absent voice but, the absence of a voice.

The purpose of this comparison and analysis was to examine the tenets of expressionism and existentialism as found in the aesthetic theories of Robin G. Collingwood and Eugene F. Kaelin, respectively. It was felt that both aesthetics proper, as a philosophic concern, and educational practices in art could benefit by the tenets of these two theories. In addition, many of the concepts explored were found to be mutually complementary not only in a logical sense but also in terms of clarifying the process of creation of works of art as well as contributing a pellucid view of response to art works.

Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument is a very influential piece of reasoning that seeks to show that colour experiences constitute an insoluble problem for science. This argument is based on a thought experiment concerning Mary. She is a vision scientist who has complete scientific knowledge of colours and colour vision but has never had colour experiences. According to Jackson, upon seeing coloured objects, Mary acquires new knowledge that escapes her complete scientific knowledge. He concludes that there are facts concerning colour experiences that scientific knowledge can neither describe nor explain. Specifically, these facts involve the occurrence of certain non-physical properties of experiences that he calls qualia. The present research considers whether a plausible formulation of the hypothesis that science can accommodate colour experiences is threatened by a version of the knowledge argument. The specific formulation of this problem has two motivations. Firstly, before investigating whether the knowledge argument raises a problem for the claim that science can account for colour experiences, we need a plausible formulation of this claim. I argue that the idea that science can accommodate colour experiences can be formulated as the modest reductionism hypothesis. Roughly speaking, this is the hypothesis that a science that can be explanatory interfaced with current physics of ordinary matter can account for conscious experiences. Secondly, an unintelligible premise figures in Jackson’s version the knowledge argument. Namely, it is assumed that Mary possesses a complete (future or possible) scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, the type of strategy involved in Jackson’s argument can be used to target modest reductionism. By considering contemporary psychophysics and neuroscience, I characterise Mary’s scientific knowledge. First, this characterisation is intelligible. In fact, it is elaborated on the basis of descriptions and explanations of colour experiences involved in current physics and neuroscience. Second, a supporter of modest reductionism can assume that the scientific knowledge ascribed to Mary might account for colour experiences. The main conclusion of the present research is that our version of the knowledge argument fails to threaten the modest reductionism hypothesis. In fact, I endorse what can be called the “two ways of thinking” reply to the knowledge argument. According to this response, the knowledge argument shows that there are different ways of thinking about colour experiences. One way of thinking is provided by scientific knowledge. The other way of thinking is provided by our ordinary conception of colour experiences. However, the existence of these two ways of thinking does not imply the existence of facts and properties that escape scientific knowledge. It might be the case that the ordinary way of thinking about colour experience concerns facts and properties described and explained by science. The principal conclusion of the research results from two investigations. The first line of research aims to reveal and evaluate the implicit assumptions that figure in the knowledge argument. The main body of the research is dedicated to this task. The principal result of this investigation is that the knowledge argument must rely on an account of introspective knowledge of colour experiences. I argue that an inferential model of introspection provides such account. On this model, Mary’s capacity to hold beliefs about her colour experiences when she sees coloured objects requires her mastery of colour concepts. The second main investigation seeks to justify the two ways of thinking strategy. As many opponents and supporters have recently started to realise, this strategy might be charged with being ad hoc. I offer a distinctive justification of this reply to the knowledge argument. Assuming the account of introspection mentioned above, the existence of visual recognitional colour concepts might justify this strategy. A person possesses these concepts when she is able to determine the colours of objects simply by having visual experiences.

Simone Weil is best known to the world as a mystic and a philosopher. She died in 1943 at the age of 34, ostensibly because she refused the hypernutrition prescribed for the treatment of her tuberculosis. Shortly after her death, thanks to the posthumous publication of her work, she was recognised as one of the twentieth centuries most original thinkers in areas as diverse as philosophy, political history, religion, and ethics. Few writers have delved into the foundational relationship she discerned between a destructive form of suffering she called "affliction" and the experience of divine love. The present dissertation exposes how this fundamental relationship lies at the centre of Weil's life and thought. / First, we correlate biographical details of Weil's life with key insights into the reality of affliction. Second, the nature of human suffering is treated as a theological concept. Through Weil we consider the limits of creatureliness to the point at which one no longer feels a part of the human community. Third, we examine Weil's insight into the radical possibility of love in response to the annihilating experience of affliction, that is, the experience of God's love for us as well as the possibility of loving the afflicted neighbour. Finally, we consider several critiques of Weil's sense of her own identity as a woman and as a Jew, and the impact of this identity crisis on her unique understanding of the relationship between suffering and the love of God.

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This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of David Cronenberg's body-horror films in relation to their embodied spectators. In these films, the horror is not only about the vulnerability of the mortal body, but also about the horrific consequences of organizing culture around the philosophical splitting of the mind from the body. To analyze this relationship, I utilize Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, object-relations psychoanalysis, especially D. W. Winnicott's theory of the intermeshed psyche-soma, various pro-feminist approaches to horror films, and a concept of ideology informed by nonverbal communication research. The historical arc of Cronenberg's body-horror films has produced a unique cultural record of the impact of technological change on physical bodies through dark fantasies of biological-medical technologies in Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, and Scanners; video communication technologies in Videodrome; and genetic-engineering technologies in The Fly . / My primary thesis is that Cronenberg's body-horror films encourage spectators to "read" not only with their rational-cognitive skills but with their embodied experience as well, which includes emotional and sensory memories, and fantasies, both archaic and contemporary. Cronenberg's appeal to an integrated psyche-soma reading is crucial for understanding how the culturally induced splitting of the mind from the body impacts on working class resistance to exploitative ideology. / In chapter one I argue that the diverse and contradictory readings of Cronenberg's body-horror films are possible, because of the interdependence of the cinematic text, historical and cultural context, and the embodied experience of spectators-critics. Chapter two is a preliminary step towards developing an alternative theory of the horror film spectator, by exploring the productive tension between an active, creative and embodied real viewer, and an ideologically determined, ideal subject of the cinematic apparatus. Chapter three compares Cronenberg's fantasy of metamorphosis body-horror to the fantasy of "leaving the body behind" depicted in many contemporary cyborg films. Chapter four is a series of close readings, analyzing how Cronenberg embeds "imaginary spectators" into his body-horror films through interweaving the body language of his characters and the nonverbal communication of the mise en scene with narrative strategies formulated through the plot.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-241).

Texte remanié de--Hist.--Dijon, 1992. Titre de soutenance : Les répressions allemandes dans le département de Saône-et-Loire, 1940-1944 : problématiques nouvelles et histoire comparative. / Bibliogr. 247-248. Index.

Thesis (MA (English))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This dissertation rests on the assumption that the literary text is fundamentally part of the world from which it emerges. Following Heidegger's understanding of the work of art as a form of unconcealment, it argues that Michael Ondaatje's fictional work Anil's Ghost discloses the particular, historically contingent conditions that determine the ethical relations people are cast into during a time of war in the present era of globalization. The novel interrogates the idea of truth in its meta-fictional discourse and stakes out the grounds of its own fictional truth in contra-distinction to truth as fact offered by Western empiricism. Alongside the implicit criticism of Western epistemology, the novel mounts a critique of the universal human rights discourse and suggests that an ethical approach to the humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka is preferable to a political solution imposed from the outside. War is presented as a radically embodying event in which the body is made vulnerable to death and injury: and the ethical imperative to alleviate physical suffering is identified as the most immediate and appropriate response to the crisis of war. Following Levinas, ethics is understood to transpire in the corporeal relation between individuals. By attending in detail to the embodied experience of being in the world, the novel prepares the ground for an ethics of the body that is closely aligned to the ethics as first philosophy espoused by Levinas. The dissertation argues throughout that the novel discloses the nature of ethical relations between people in the world by means of its aesthetic forms of language. The domain of the ethical and aesthetics are thus commensurate.