<p>This thesis explores the notion of selfhood and its relationship to larger philosophical frameworks. In Chapter One the author traces various understandings of the self as they have appeared historically in Western philosophy. This understanding of the self posits it as something static and unchanging. The author argues that this was largely the result of certain ontological or metaphysical commitments of the broader philosophical frameworks in which the self was situated. In Chapter Two Deleuze's ontology is explored as an alternative to what the author takes to be typical Western ontologies. It is argued that Deleuze's 'fractal ontology' is radically different because it begins and ends with multiplicity and becoming. This new understanding of ontology provides the basis for understanding the self as multiplicitous and anarchic rather than static and essentialist. In the final chapter, the author seeks to explore the resulting understanding of selfhood as decentralized and multiplicitous. It is asserted that such an understanding of the self is philosophically compelling given the new Deleuzian ontology. It is further argued that this understanding of the self is practically superior to traditional static understandings of the self because it more fully accommodates personal and societal growth.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>The objective of this thesis is to intervene into the ongoing dispute surrounding the political import of Gilles Deleuze’s single-authored work, specifically <em>Difference and Repetition</em> and <em>The Logic of Sense</em>. This thesis presents an alternative explanation to the question of whether or not Deleuze’s philosophy is political. By situating the debate surrounding Deleuze’s political implications in the contemporary ontological turn in political theory, this thesis argues that Deleuze’s works can be considered to be political in the non-conventional sense of the term, that is, insofar as a conceptual distinction is made between <em>politics</em> and <em>the political</em>. I further argue that Deleuze’s univocal ontology influences a concept of <em>the political </em>that is immanent to his thought, and in this respect he can be said to present a <em>political ontology</em>. The reading of Deleuze’s political ontology addresses not only the common critiques of his philosophy as posed by thinkers such as Alain Badiou, Peter Hallward, and Slavoj Žižek, but also sheds light on the problematic relationship between philosophy and politics.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p> <p>I argue that the relationship between Levinas and Plato is best described as one of inspiration, because both thinkers understand themselves as inspired by a transcendent Good. Levinas’ obscure and frequent citations of Plato have led many scholars to conclude that their relationship is impossible to understand, but I argue that an implicit Platonic inspiration is at the root of each of Levinas’ polemic and descriptive arguments.</p> <p>My method is to map the overlap between Levinas and Plato in <em>Totality and Infinity</em> and <em>Otherwise than Being</em>. Inspiration, as a unifying concept, emerges from this mapping. I also consider Derrida’s demonstration of how difficult it is for Levinas to align himself with Plato. I argue that Derrida has missed the Platonic inspiration at the core of Levinasian philosophy and therefore cannot understand how the two are aligned. For both Levinas and Plato, inspiration puts the thinker’s ability to act in question, and makes the thinker realize his passivity to the transcendent Good.</p> / Master of Philosophy (MA)

Few philosophers, today, are doing more than simple recognition of Levinass debt to phenomenology when a thorough explication of how phenomenological methodology impacts Levinass work is needed. This dissertation is the needed discussion of methodology that has been so absent in Levinas as well as in so many of his interpreters. The purpose, herein, is to synthesize Levinass work, explicating it in terms of transcendental methodology, the result of which reveals Levinass claims to be more defensible when understood in these terms than when the full rigor of this methodology is not properly grasped. First, to connect Levinas to transcendental phenomenology a correct perspective of the phenomenological tradition is needed. I argue that phenomenology is a methodology that discloses those horizons that condition experience such that appearance takes on meaning. I further argue that it is important to see this disclosure as something open-ended and ongoing rather than a method capable of fully revealing a final telos. Levinas fits into this methodology by providing the ethical as just such a horizonal condition, while his constant returning to this theme highlights the need to keep reworking the description of its meaningful impact on experience. Second, I defend Levinas from those who claim his work cannot be phenomenological, based on what they see as an implied Jewish tradition informing his description. I argue that what must be understood is that Levinass reference to God, Biblical stories, and Jewish wisdom impose an unsettling language that is introduced to replace traditional phenomenological language that does not always allow for the goals phenomenology sets for itself. This imposition does not use the Jewish tradition to make his argument but as a vocabulary far better at describing the ethical condition than what is commonly used in phenomenology. The final step of explication involves the actual application of the methodology, now understood aright, to Levinass claims about the other, the self, and the ethical. The result is that once we understand the ethical as the infinite originative horizon out of which the conscious ego emerges, later interpretations of Levinas will be able to successfully move beyond his work.

Iconoclastic discourse, as a critique of ‘idols’ of various kinds, has been appropriated by a range of different thinkers and traditions – often not always explicitly religious – throughout history. One of the more recent targets of iconoclasm is metaphysics, understood as a way of doing philosophy that appeals to an ideal or transcendent ground that is used to offer a totalising explanation of ‘reality’. For some reason, the issue of ‘metaphysical idolatry’ has become entangled with the problem of ‘writing’, or ‘representation’ more generally, which is pictured in some rather strange ways by a range of thinkers and theorists – including philosophers and theologians such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and Catherine Pickstock – in order to either challenge, or to be held accountable for, the ‘idolatry’ of metaphysical thought. It seems, however, that these strange pictures of writing compound rather than solve the problem of metaphysics, and it is towards pictures such as these that we direct our own iconoclastic critique. What many critics of metaphysics have failed to comprehend, we argue, is that metaphysics is a certain type of philosophical practice, and it must therefore be judged from this perspective. Idolatry itself has, since biblical times, been understood as a form of sinful practice, and unless we understand iconoclastic problems in a praxeological way, we risk basing our critical arguments on delusional assumptions. We turn to the work of thinkers as diverse as Marx, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Ryle, Bourdieu, Ingold, and others, who have challenged metaphysics, and the strange pictures that metaphysical thought has inspired, through the adoption of what we call a praxeological approach. It is from this perspective, we argue, that we can make iconoclastic judgements, and justify these judgements, in a way that avoids the speculative conundrums of some other more problematic approaches.

This thesis seeks to identify, explain, and differentiate the problems of existential doubt and the burden of choice in today’s world versus the previous epochs of human existence. It will attempt to discern the relevant differences in the types of existential doubt, illustrate how these differences came about, and analyze the strength of a potential solution to these problems. My aim is to critique Dreyfus and Kelly’s portrayal and solution to these problems in a way that can further promulgate discussion on an increasingly relevant topic in philosophy, mental health, and science. The conclusion will provide a novel understanding of contemporary nihilism that might be of use in combating this epidemic.

John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo are two of the main thinkers in continental philosophy’s return to religion. This return is accommodated by the basic theoretical framework of irony, which is predominantly an unspoken determinant upon textual meaning. In this continental sense, irony affirms and negates the subject matter that it speaks about. Adopting this framework, Caputo and Vattimo suggest that a new Christian-irony is desirable to avert a collapse back into the violence that results from metaphysics, either modern or classical, by remaining in deconstruction’s loosely held wavering between theism and atheism. The question that remains to be proven, however, is whether their ironic method of writing is not inadvertently continuing the negative effect of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian paradigm by persisting with the literary style of writing that is intrinsic to it, even while openly refuting it by their affirmative Judeo-Christian surface content.

This thesis examines the role of woman within Nietzsche’s late-middle period, through The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as well as interrogating the more social or political elements of nihilism, in order to conceptualize a novel reading of Nietzsche’s figure of the Overman. The motivation for this project is to create an understanding of the Overman that stands in stark contrast to those interpretations of Nietzsche advanced and deployed by those on the far-right of the political spectrum, who historically have used Nietzsche’s ideas to justify acts of cruelty and violence through an appeal to preservation of the self and of the same. I begin with the idea that woman is representative of truth for Nietzsche through her embodiment of difference, both internal to herself and within her relationship to man. This view of woman within the thesis is led by the work of Luce Irigaray in her work Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, and a reading of her work alongside Nietzsche’s Gay Science comprise the first chapter. In the second chapter, I chart different typologies of nihilism as advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Alenka Zupančič in order to probe their status as “universal”. I also delve into the eternal return as the process through which nihilism is overcome and the Overman emerges, as perhaps an eternal return of the different rather than the same. In the final chapter, the lessons from the beginning of the thesis are applied to a reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in order to read difference into that text toward the overcoming of nihilism and the birth of the Overman.

John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo are two of the main thinkers in continental philosophy’s return to religion. This return is accommodated by the basic theoretical framework of irony, which is predominantly an unspoken determinant upon textual meaning. In this continental sense, irony affirms and negates the subject matter that it speaks about. Adopting this framework, Caputo and Vattimo suggest that a new Christian-irony is desirable to avert a collapse back into the violence that results from metaphysics, either modern or classical, by remaining in deconstruction’s loosely held wavering between theism and atheism. The question that remains to be proven, however, is whether their ironic method of writing is not inadvertently continuing the negative effect of the Nietzschean-Heideggerian paradigm by persisting with the literary style of writing that is intrinsic to it, even while openly refuting it by their affirmative Judeo-Christian surface content.

The problem of a method of historical analysis played an integral part in the scholarship of Ernst Cassirer, German philosopher and historian. An Essay on Man, the work for which he is best known in the United State, includes his most lucid discussion of the tasks and aims of the historian. The historian must reconstruct the past, infusing it with the immediacy of a living expression. “Rebirth of the past” gives man a better view of his potentialities, a freedom to see beyond the demands, characteristics, and contingencies of the moment. This view of history and the historian’s task was reiterated by Cassirer in several of his works on theory and was implicit in a number of his books and articles on historical topics. The following critique will focus on Cassirer’s discussion of history and on his historical method as it was demonstrated in several of his writings. Despite the criticism of Cassirer’s penchant for structure and affinity for schemata, he has had a profound influence on the general community of historians. His work in many areas was unique and he did considerable original research. He has had some influence on subsequent historians, especially with some of the specifics of his data. Even the abundance of criticisms of his works attests to the to the seriousness with which he has been viewed as a historian.