David Rosenthal, in his Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, argues that it is a higher-order thought to the effect that the subject is in a conscious state that makes one conscious of his or her own mental states. In this paper, I argue that since phenomenal consciousness can be vague and Rosenthal’s HOT cannot, HOT is not a necessary condition of phenomenal consciousness. I use primarily Ned Blocks’ refrigerator hum case and Sartre’s example of non-positional awareness to argue that the threshold which determines the degree of first-person awareness necessary for a mental state to be conscious is vague itself, therefore consciousness is a vague concept. HOT cannot accommodate for borderline cases of phenomenal consciousness, therefore it cannot be a necessary condition of all conscious mental states. This is especially relevant in the discussion of non-human animal consciousness, as HOT theories such as Carruthers have been used to deny non-human animal consciousness on the basis of the on/off feature of such representational theories.

As a Religious Studies and Humanities: Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture major, I have noticed several striking similarities between South Asian religious philosophies and Continental philosophy. However, this also brought my attention to the severe lack of representation of South Asian philosophies. I began to see the resonances with Jainism and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism. Therefore, my thesis explores the similarities between atheism, subjectivity and responsibility as common concepts between Sartrean Existentialism and Jainism.

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded on perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see how Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception avoids both rationalism and empiricism. Whereas empiricism has argued that all the content of our knowledge is grounded in causal interactions between the world and our senses, and rationalism has held that experience does not suffice as a reason for knowledge, thinking of the relation between experience and knowledge in terms of motivation allows us to see how knowledge can be grounded in experience while at the same time transcending it.

At the nexus of the seemingly disparate art-theoretical topics of color and the female nude is a critical consideration of phenomenology in both one of its most basic senses—as the first-person experience of perceived phenomena—and as a larger philosophical position which, through its abstraction of perception to subject-object relationships, implicates the painted figure. Specifically, this paper conflates the phenomenology of color with the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in investigating empathy. Structured as a dialectic, it establishes the most prominent views of both color and the female nude—the nude as a symbolic figure, color as perceptual experience—before delving into their various points of theoretical and art-historical intersection within these categories. This analysis ultimately forms the argument that color can be a powerful tool in reclaiming the female nude figure, stimulating emotive bodies that inspire empathetic viewers and intersubjective rather than objectifying, or abjectifying, dialogues.

This paper will argue in three sections that Thus Spoke Zarathustra necessarily implies an aristocratic political system. In the section "Zarathustra’s Value Theory," I lay out Zarathustra's theory of value creation. In the second section, "Possible Interpretations of Value Creation," I describe three different perspectives that can be used to understand Zarathustra’s value theory. In the third section, "Zarathustra and Politics" I provide a critique of modern liberalism and an alternative coherent with Nietzsche's philosophy, aristocracy.

This dissertation formulates and describes a type of thinking called critical-reflective thinking. Examples of critical-reflective thinking appear in the works of many major Western philosophical figures, including the main thinkers considered here, Plato, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Henry David Thoreau. Although this list of thinkers is eclectic, these philosophers come together in describing a common phenomenon, although they do not thematically designate or explain it. Their works illustrate a type of thinking in which people are invited by prompting events to consider their presuppositions—notions they have taken as true without prior consideration. I have deemed this phenomenon “critical-reflective thinking” to emphasize its dimensions of self-reflection and critical consideration. By exploring examples from the works of the authors listed above (among others, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Elaine Scarry), I formulate critical-reflective thinking as a specific phenomenon. In Chapter One, I formulate this important type of human thought by describing its occurrence, especially the invitation of the prompt and the disclosure and examination of presuppositions. In Chapter Two, this dissertation explicates the value of taking part in this type of thinking. Since critical-reflective thinking allows people to consider previously unreflective aspects of their understanding (i.e. presuppositions), by taking part in critical-reflective thinking, people stand to grow in self-awareness and become liberated to new possible ways of seeing the world and going about life. Given the value of such growth and liberation, it is important to explore how humans can develop the practice critical-reflective thinking. Chapter Three explores strategies for cultivating critical-reflective thinking. Plato, Heidegger, Arendt, and Thoreau suggest five such strategies: spending time in solitude, taking leisure, developing an open attitude, practicing wakeful attentiveness, and acquire virtues such as humility, courage, and fortitude. Formulating and exploring the phenomenon of critical-reflective thinking not only provides a theory of a type of thinking, but also describes an important aspect of human experience. This dissertation encourages readers to consider their own experiences of thinking. It also poses the challenge of leading a more examined life by critically-reflecting on notions we often take as given.

This thesis analyzes Martin Heidegger's early interpretation of Aristotelian concepts. The goal is to acquire an increased understanding of the ideas underlying Aristotle's political philosophy, as well as those underlying Heidegger's own later philosophy. The investigation begins with a critique of Kantian logic and the assumptions which underlie it, which are ultimately traced back to Aristotle. The passages that pertain to Kant's interpretation are assessed by Heidegger, who concludes that it is speaking, not explicit definition, that grounds possibility for life in a human sense. To demonstrate Heidegger's argument, the thesis transitions into an assessment of the Greek view of life and the way it influences Aristotle's investigation of the human being. The goal of the first three chapters is ultimately to demonstrate the manner in which speaking allows for a unique way of being in the world for the human being, a way of being that makes ethical disposition and thus moral excellence possible. Beginning in Chapter 4, the thesis discusses the Aristotelian concept of ends and endhood, ultimately outlining the manner in which Aristotle goes about his investigation in the Nicomachean Ethics which serves to re-emphasize the interpretation set forth in the first half of the thesis. After giving an account of eudaimonia, the thesis discusses rhetoric and politics in chapter five, since it is demonstrated that an ethical disposition cannot be acquired without both being and conversing with other people in a community. A brief account of Aristotle's conclusions in the Politics and Rhetoric follows, and the thesis concludes with an outline of the web of ideas that Heidegger has set forth in his interpretation. The thesis also provides an in-depth interpretation of key passages from the Metaphysics, Politics, Rhetoric, De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics which ultimately serve as examples of Heidegger's unique manner of interpretation to the reader.

This thesis covers the uncertainty of empirical prediction. As opposed to objectivity, I will discuss the practicality of statistics. Practicality defined as "useful" in an unbiased sense, in relation to something in the external world that we care about. We want our model of prediction to give us unbiased inference whilst also being able to speak about something we care about. For the reasons explained, the inherent uncertainty of statistics undermines the unbiased inference for many methods. Bayesian Statistics, by valuing hypotheses is more plausible but ultimately cannot arrive at an unbiased inference. I posit the value theory of money as a concept that might be able to allow us to derive unbiased inferences from while still being something we care about. However, money is of instrumental value, ultimately being worth less than an object of “transcendental value.” Which I define as something that is worth more than money since money’s purpose is to help us achieve “transcendental value” under the value theory. Ultimately, as long as an individual has faith in a given hypothesis it will be worth more than any hypothesis valued with money. From there we undermine statistic’s practicality as it seems as though without the concept of money we have no manner of valuing hypotheses unbiasedly, and uncertainty undermines the “objective” inferences we might have been able to make.

Connections between George Eliot and Immanuel Kant have been, for the most part, neglected. However, we have good reason to believe that Eliot not only read Kant (as well as many who were directly influenced by Kant), but substantially agreed with him on critical and moral issues. This thesis investigates one of the issues on which Kant and Eliot were most closely aligned, the need for duty in morality. Both the English novelist and the German philosopher upheld a vision of duty that could command absolutely while remaining consonant with human freedom and grounding a sense of moral dignity. This vision runs throughout the works of both writers, but is first developed and takes on a particular urgency in the works examined in this thesis, ranging from some of their early publications to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Eliot’s Romola. The first chapter discusses duty in the wider context of debates about Divine Command Morality, in which the good is defined by its accord with the will or command of God, and which both Kant and Eliot resisted in formulating their own moral visions (while maintaining the language of law and command). This chapter also discusses evidence we have for Eliot’s familiarity with Kant and establishes critical context for this paper. The second chapter discusses religion – in particular, religious enthusiasm – as a necessary background for duty, which exists in the absence of theological certitude, even as it seeks to preserve something of religion’s capacity to command and its popular scope. Kant’s path to the first Critique led through works foundational for, but also sometimes at odds with the priorities and conclusions of critical science, and Eliot’s first novel was preceded by a critical career that paints a quite different picture of religion than the sympathetic portrait of Dinah Morris. The third chapter deals with three dimensions of duty in Kant and Eliot, autonomy, reflection and respect, primarily through Kant’s second Critique and The Mill on the Floss. In the conclusion, I turn to Romola to illustrate the conflict and indeterminative power inherent in this conception of duty.

abstract: This dissertation is positioned at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and critical theory in order to explore the way early modern literature may be enlisted as a vehicle for a return to an ethically informed humanism, specifically with regard to how Western culture currently understands the contingent categories of "life" and "the human." While a great deal of critical work is currently being marshaled in the field of biopolitics, scholarly focus continues to be placed on the materiality of the physical body, or what I term "biopolitical materialism." What remains underexplored, however, is the reality that "life" and "the human" are deeply relational categories that should not be reduced to such material instances alone. Historically, and especially in the early modern period, "life" and "the human" are understood as interconnected and widely networked. Although such materialism indeed becomes solidified in the seventeenth-century, I seek to recuperate an ethical challenge to contemporary biopolitical materialism through an extended dialogue with early modern thinkers. By turning to works "in the Age of Shakespeare" I return attention to the originary epoch of what has been described as our "modern event horizon." I argue that within the very historical period that gives rise to the practice of biopolitical materialism exists a rich textual archive of resistance to this troubling phenomenon in the form of neighborly concern and the acknowledgement of shared creaturely estate. Chapter One inaugurates my argument by turning to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, reading as its central theme the tragic effect inherent to dissociating the individual from the community. The remaining three chapters attend to neighborly forms given expression in three of Shakespeare's late plays: Chapter Two considers the potential political orientation of grace in Measure for Measure; Chapter Three positions neighborliness as a series of posthuman encounters in The Winter's Tale; and Chapter Four explores an early modern understanding of hospitality as stewardship at work in Timon of Athens. I conclude by turning to philosophy and political theology in order to suggest a way to think "life" as an ethical relation with, in, and through "the Age of Shakespeare." / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014