This philosophical dissertation concerns the nature of play, a nebulous concept that is nonetheless vitally important to understanding the human being. Play is older than the spoken word and represents a mode of being in the world for many animals, including us. Many thinkers have attempted to unravel the mysteries of play but it has long resisted attempts to fully capture it. I begin Part One by defining play – a trickier proposition that one might expect – and examining the biological origin of the instinct for play in boredom and fun. Part One is a genetic account of play. Part Two contains a memetic account of play – these five chapters look at personal, human play in particular. They cover five philosophical topics: how the play concept has been used in the history of philosophy, the phenomenological experience of play, the relations between play and reason, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of play, and the relation between play and the production of culture. By examining the discourse surrounding the concept of play in these spheres of human activity, this treatise provides a thorough philosophical understanding of play as a foundation upon which future studies of the play concept can build.

The Eternal Boy is a Greek Tragedy that considers the consequences of the Great God Pan’s death.

It’s Always Better With A Good DM is about our relationship with objects and maps as a vector for fantasy. Beginning from the premise that humans understand the world via narrative, I am concerned with the loss of imagination in adulthood in lieu of ideology, which is no more real than stories of future and fantastic places.

The following five essays are connected by their reference to a scene – imagined by the author Thomas Pynchon. The disappearance of historical cause, the subject, and the human constitute this epistemological scene. Each essay can be read without logically building off of any other – yet they form a wider assemblage of interpretative theory. These are fragments capable of recombination in any order. They shun systematization but welcome kinship. Pynchon's fiction is the substrate underlying each. Abstract machines of theorists thinking on similar wavelengths are used as catalysts in an effort to force a reaction – an attempt to transmute the stories of paranoid schlemihls into yet more paranoid epistemologies. How do we understand the degree to which we are organized by whatever systematizes? How do we relate to whatever organizes our knowledge, our identities? What, exactly, is playing us? These are the anxieties these essays share with Pynchon's characters and formulate the questions driving their theory. Call it the Post-Modern, the Post-Human, or any other Post, Pynchon anticipated its event horizon half a century before its more obvious implications made themselves clear. If we have passed fully over this horizon, figuring out where we are and what's going on has become a question of survival, and Pynchon's anticipation of our contemporary scene have become increasingly salient. These essays offer paranoid epistemologies for the age of disappearance.

This thesis explores the intellectual history of editor, writer, and philosopher, Paul Piccone and Telos, an independent journal of contemporary critical theory, which he founded in 1968. Born in Italy, Piccone lived most of his life in the United States, earning his Ph.D. in philosophy at SUNY-Buffalo in 1970. Piccone served as Telos’ editor and a major contributor from 1968 to 2004. This thesis follows the trajectory of his thought by contextualizing his writing within the broader world of Marxist, and eventually post-Marxist, political philosophy. Telos also concerned itself with modern interpretations of historical dialectics and early 20th-century Marxist philosophy. Piccone himself predicated much of his philosophy on Husserlian phenomenology, which stresses concrete experiences, and his writing therefore stands at a unique confluence of Husserl and Marx. Piccone ultimately became a leading exponent of anti-Liberal philosophy and the theory of artificial negativity, which examines capitalist hegemony in both material and socio-historical terms.

The Ambivalent Animal project explores the interactions of animals, culture and technology. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory, each in ways that inspire the other. My creative practice centers around two projects that focus on domestic pets. These projects highlight the animal's uncertain status as they explore the overlapping ontologies of animal, human and machine. They provide concrete artifacts that engage with theoretical issues of anthropocentrism, animality and alterity. My theoretical work navigates between the fields of animal studies, art and design, media and culture studies, and philosophy. My dissertation explores animality through four real and imagined animal roles: cyborg, clone, chimera and shapeshifter. Each animal role is considered in relation to three dialectics: irreducibility and procedurality, autonomy and integration, aura and abjection. These dialectics do not seek full synthesis but instead embrace the oscillations of irresolvable debates and desires. The dialectics bring into focus issues of epistemology, ontology, corporeality and subjectivity. When the four animal roles engage the three dialectics, connected yet varied themes emerge. The cyborgian animal is simultaneously liberated and regulated, assisted and restricted, integrated and isolated. The cloned animal is an emblem of renewal and loss; she is both idealized code and material flesh and finds herself caught in the battles of nature and nurture. The chimera is both rebel and conformist; his unusual juxtapositions pioneer radical corporeal transgressions but also conform to the mechanisms of global capital. And the shapeshifter explores the thrill and anxiety of an altered phenomenology; she gains new perceptions though unstable subjectivity. These roles reveal corporeal adjustments and unfamiliar subjectivities that inspire the creative practice. Both my writing and making employ an ambivalent aesthetic--an aesthetic approach that evokes two or more incompatible sensibilities. The animal's uncertain status contributes to this aesthetic: some animals enjoy remarkable care and attention, while others are routinely exploited, abused and discarded. Ambivalence acknowledges the complexity of lived experience, philosophical and political debate, and academic inquiry. My approach recognizes the light and dark of these complex ambivalences--it privileges paradox and embraces the confusion and wonder of creative research. Rather than erase, conceal or resolve ambiguity, an ambivalent aesthetic foregrounds the limits of language and representation and highlights contradiction and irresolution.

Meiner nichtreduktionistischen Lesart Gadamers, derzufolge eine wechselseitige konstitutive Relation zwischen „Sprache“ und „Erfahrung“ besteht, ist es gestattet, den Vorwurf, die Sprachphilosophie Gadamers führe in den Relativismus, den man häufig gegenüber sprachphilosophischen Positionen erhebt, abzuweisen. Manchen Denkern zufolge haben die Philosophen der Postmoderne, zu denen auch Gadamer gezählt wurde, eine einfache Umkehrung der beiden Pole des modernen Verhältnisses „Sprache“ – „Erfahrung“ vollzogen: Während die Sprache in der Moderne in ihrer Bedingtheit zur Erfahrung und als bloßes Ausdrucksmittel verstanden wurde, wurde dieses Verhältnis in der neueren Philosophie nur umgekehrt, insofern die Philosophie in der Sprache das Fundament für die Erfahrung sehe, wonach die Erfahrung als ein Ausdruck der Sprache erscheine. Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt sich mit diesem Relativismusvorwurf auseinander und beabsichtigt, eine wechselseitige Abhängigkeit zwischen Sprache und Erfahrung ausgehend von Hans-Georg Gadamers Werk zu entwickeln. Um das zu erreichen, wurden zunächst eine doppelte negative-positive Erfahrungsstruktur und dann einige phänomenologische und transzendentale Merkmale der Erfahrung auf dem historischen Hintergrund für Gadamers Erfahrungsbegriff herausgearbeitet. Somit machte sich die konstitutive Sprachlichkeit der Erfahrung erkennbar. In einer Auseinandersetzung mit dem Sprachbegriff auf der anderen Seite wurde sein dialogischer und welterschließender Charakter veranschaulicht, so dass auch seine Angewiesenheit auf die Welterfahrung offenkundig wurde. / This work deals with a particular relativistic objection on Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy of language, according to which the position of language has such a prior status so that human experience is solely dependent on the language people speak. That is a reductionist approach to Gadamer’s hermeneutic, which ascribes language an exclusively explanatory and foundational status. I am taking this objection to a close examination and develop a double argumentation line: On the one side I show how the concept of world experience is language determined, and on the other side how the language itself is determined by our experience of the world. In order to argue for this interdependence, I first examined the positive and negative structure of experience, some phenomenological and transcendental features and offered a short historical background of ties to selected philosophical heritage. In the second part of the work I developed a concept of language that argues for its dialogical and not absolutely transsubjective character, also for its world-disclosing alongside its communicative and representational dimension. Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy of language, belonging to the continental philosophy or HHH Theories represents an antireductionist approach to language after the linguistic turn, which is often criticized for a linguistic reductionism and relativism.

No form of philosophy is without literary style. This is not always appreciated and opponents of style within philosophy often seem to be unaware of the role of style. Arguments that style is bad, good, or that diversity of styles is good needs to be investigated so that the underlying presuppositions and the meaning of different literary styles becomes clear. This thesis examines three arguments for and against style within philosophy and the relevance of literary style for the philosophical method. I investigate what arguments and fundamental assumptions about language that underlies the judgments that literary style in philosophy is either 1.) bad, 2.) good or, 3.) both bad and good (a diversity position). An analysis of three different positions to the question of the relevance of style will be performed. The analysis focuses on the basic understandings of what language is and does and reveals the underlying presuppositions of the attitudes towards style in philosophy. Only then can the different positions and attitudes towards style be defended and examined in an interesting and relevant way. The debate about philosophical style often misses a significant point because many are unaware of the philosophical presuppositions behind the arguments, and the argumentation risks to be flawed in relation to this. Firstly, a presentation of three different attitudes towards the relevance of style to the philosophical method is outlined. The approaches are represented by a reading of philosophers who either describe the relevance of literary style as 1.) bad, or not important for the method, 2.) important/necessary for the method, or 3.) that diversity is good for philosophy. Secondly, I examine how these three approaches are affected by the underlying philosophy of language with a focus on theories of metaphor. Depending on how one believes that language is related to reality and ourselves, one will assess style as a more, or less, relevant and contributing aspect of the philosophical work and method. The analysis shows that metaphors and other literary stylistic tools might sometimes be necessary and mediate something that cannot be expressed in another way: language can never capture the full potential of reality.

This study aims to trace points of intersection between the too often divorced disciplines of literature, continental philosophy, and the hard sciences in Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the House of Love.” In short, this thesis will not only explore how such conversations surface within the short story, but will also serve as an explication of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of body and space, and the theory of epigenetics. Through these explications, the thesis itself will also gear one discipline towards the other as both theories intimately bind the environment with the body, and the body with the environment. Thus, the body and the environment are not separate and passive, but active and intertwined in a manner much like the aforementioned disciplines I posit are. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to first postulate that such conversations between literature, philosophy, and science are already occurring, and as such, stress that such conversations need further discussion and exploration.

This research is a historical-exegetical analysis of Hegel’s reformulation of Kant’s regulative principle of teleology into a constitutive principle. Kant ascribes teleology to the faculty of reflective judgment where it is employed as a guide to regulate inquiry, but does not constitute actual knowledge. Hegel argues that if Kant made teleology into a constitutive principle then it would be a much more comprehensive theory capable of overcoming contingency in natural science, and hence, bridging the gap between natural science and theology. In this paper I argue that Hegel’s defense of the transition from natural science to theology is ultimately unsuccessful because it is built upon on an instinct of reason, which is the instinctive feature of human rationality to transition beyond the contingency remaining in our empirical understanding of nature, to a theological understanding of nature, in which all aspects of nature are necessarily related.