Using the scholarship of Robert Cushman to navigate Plato’s dialogues, Chapter 1 of this thesis establishes their multifaceted model of philosophy as therapeia. Said model includes Plato’s practical diagnosis of the human condition, his many notions formulated as a cure, and this first chapter ends by briefly responding to some of Martha Nussbaum’ recent criticisms of "Platonism," within The Therapy of Desire, and expounding upon the dialogue Phaedrus as Plato's therapeutic treatment of eros. Chapter 2 looks to the works of Dieter Henrich and T.K Seung in order to explore their proposed links between the philosophies of Plato and Kant, carving out a space for a new connection of therapeia. Chapter 3 discusses The Critique of Pure Reason in light of Plato’s own therapeutic philosophy, analyzing Kant’s unique diagnosis of a further, intellectual aspect of the human condition, his basic means of treating it, and the ideal form of human activity toward which he intends to direct our abortive intellectual desires.

FundaÃÃo de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Cearà / Cette recherche se propose d‟analyser la pensÃe de Jacques Derrida et plus particuliÃrement ce que se cache dans la vraie idÃe de la deconstruction. J‟examine d‟avant tout deux possibilitÃs de lectures de la pensÃe de Derrida. La premiÃre lecture est la lecture critique de J.Habermas, qui soutient que la deconstruction derridienne doit Ãtre interprÃtÃe comme une thÃorie de la connaissance. Cette position me semble extremement erronÃe, puis que la pensÃe de Derrida ne repose pas sur un fond rationaliste traditionnel. Par opposition à la lecture habermasienne, je veux dÃvÃlopper une interpretation de la deconstruction derridienne sur une prisme essentiellement Ãthique. En ce sens, je dÃfend la thÃse que la pensÃe de Derrida ne peut pas Ãtre compris en profondeur sauf quand on la situe à la proximità de la philosophie pratique de Emannuel LÃvinas. L‟erreur de Habermas et de tous les autres intÃrpretes qui voient le discours derridienne comme une discours contradictoire rÃside en quâils prendrent la deconstruction en un sens strictement ÃpistÃmologique, au pas que je veux dÃmontrer que la vrai idÃe de la deconstruction se rapporte avec le champ de l‟Ãthique. / Este trabalho pretende analisar o pensamento de Jacques Derrida, em especial o lugar em que se situa sua idÃia de desconstruÃÃo. Nesse sentido, procuro abordar duas possibilidades de leituras do pensamento derridiano. A primeira leitura consiste na leitura crÃtica de Habermas, que sustenta que a desconstruÃÃo derridiana deve ser compreendida como uma teoria do conhecimento. Tal posiÃÃo me parece extremamente problemÃtica, tendo em vista que o pensamento de Derrida nÃo repousa sobre um fundo racionalista tradicional. Em contrapartida, eu pretendo desenvolver uma interpretacÃo da desconstruÃÃo derridiana sobre um prisma essencialmente Ãtico. Neste caso, defendo a tese que o pensamento de Derrida nÃo pode ser tomado em profundeza salvo quando situado prÃximo da filosofia prÃtica de Emannuel LÃvinas. O erro de Habermas e de todos outros intÃrpretes que enxergam o discurso derridiano como um discurso contraditÃrio reside em tomar a desconstruÃÃo sob uma Ãtica estritamente epistemolÃgica, ao passo que, a meu ver, a verdadeira idÃia da desconstruÃÃo se relaciona com questÃes do campo da Ãtica.

Traditional Marxist historical materialism employs a material analysis that privileges how capitalism interacts with subject formation and has been used in recent historicizations of sexuality. This paper understands that line of analysis to be gendering, racializing, and pathologizing and examines LGBTQ history as a starting point to decenter capitalism from the analysis. Using Roderick Ferguson's "queer of color" critique, this paper maintains that more specifically, history should attend to the emergence of surplus populations which capitalism keeps hidden. Under the umbrella of queer of color critique, migration studies, transnational perspectives, and the destabilizing nature of queer theory all have the capacity to provide a fuller view of sexual difference and the histories of LGBTQ and other surplus populations. Furthermore, a legal framework provides an opportunity to take theory into practice by examining legislation with the analytical scope of queer of color and from an anti-capitalist vantage point.

After World War II the United States, faced with the new Soviet threat of Communism, instituted the foreign policy known as “containment” in order to mitigate the threat to Western European states of Soviet expansionism. After the fall of Communism in the USSR in 1991 that policy was deemed, at once, a success and an anachronism. The power vacuum that the subsequent abandonment of that policy created was most notable in the Islamic states that had served as proxies in the Cold War against Communism. Both the backdrop of containment as well as the withdrawal of that policy served to lay the foundation for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world as a function of American hegemony after 1991.

La Phénoménologie de la vie de Michel Henry est-elle porteuse d’une éthique et, si tel est le cas, quelles sont les coordonnées principales de celle-ci ? C’est cette double question que se propose d’étudier la recherche menée ici. Alors que les textes que M. Henry consacre explicitement à l’éthique sont peu nombreux, il apparaît cependant que la distinction barbarie/culture représente le fil conducteur d’une critique qui ne peut être considérée comme axiologiquement neutre. L’analyse de la continuité de cette distinction dans le corpus de la Phénoménologie de la vie permet ainsi de clarifier le sens que pourrait prendre une « éthique de la culture ». Ce sens est intimement lié à la compréhension de la vie comme affectivité immanente et transcendantale. L’éthique de M. Henry peut alors se caractériser comme une éthique de l’affectivité dont l’enjeu se situe dans une possible reconnaissance de la vie. La question est cependant aussi de savoir dans quelle mesure un discours éthique peut non seulement être tenu sur ce qui, en raison de son immanence, échappe par principe à l’intentionnalité, mais peut également posséder une effectivité pratique à son égard. La discursivité éthique peut alors être pensée comme articulation de la theoria à la praxis, notamment à travers les concepts de quasi-performativité et de traduction. C’est finalement l’ensemble du texte de la Phénoménologie de la vie qui se révèle dans sa dimension éthique, dimension qu’il est également possible de mettre en perspective dans le champ du politique. / Does Michel Henry’s Phenomenology of life contain specific ethics and, in that case, what is their nature? The aim of this research is to bring an answer to this question. Although M. Henry has written only a small number of texts referring specifically to ethics, it nonetheless appears that his distinction between barbarism and culture provides a critique that cannot be considered axiologically neutral. Analyzing the continuity of that distinction throughout the body of Phenomenology of life clears the path to an understanding of the meaning that an “ethics of culture” could have. This meaning is directly linked to an understanding of life as immanent and transcendental affectivity. M. Henry’s ethics can thereby be characterized as the ethics of affectivity, the central stake of which lies in the recognition of life. However, the question is to what extent an ethical discourse can be held on a reality that, being immanent, is principally inaccessible for intentionality and how such discourse can have practical effectiveness with regard to that reality. Ethical discursivity may then be understood as articulating theoria and praxis, especially through the concepts of quasi-performativity and translation. Finally, the whole text of the Phenomenology of life appears in its ethical dimension, a dimension which can equally be put in perspective with the field of politics.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, widespread Catholic commentary cast a congeries of prophets, millenarians, freethinkers, metaphysicians, and other (ir)religious outsiders as an indictment of Protestantism in America. To Catholics, Mormons and Millerites, atheists and agnostics, Spiritualists and Christian Scientists were the exegetical and educational products of Protestantism. And mainstream Protestant reactions to these groups exposed the contradictions of Protestant power and anti-Catholic discourse in America. Catholics argued that proliferating religious radicals ultimately belied Protestants’ portrayals of their own exegetical, intellectual, and politico-religious freedom from Catholic oppression. Recovering Catholic commentary on religious outsiders and Protestantism in America helps correct the historiographical neglect of Catholic responses to anti-Catholicism, present oft-obscured historical Catholic perspectives on American religious history, recover a polemical dialogue where historians have offered a Protestant monologue, and qualify the historical cogency of anti-Catholic discourse in America. Most importantly, this study reveals a rare instance in which one marginalized religious group used other marginalized religious groups to interrogate and critique, rather than appeal to and deflect criticism from, a religious mainstream.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

In this study I employ Lacanian psychoanalysis and ideological criticism to analyze the development of "gender and mathematics" research over the past fifty years. This study is motivated by the original Marxist-Lacanian claim by Valerie Walkerdine in the 1980s that women's relationship with mathematics must always be considered as fundamentally problematic, and by the complex and often contradictory claims that are made in research artifacts that report on this topic. Many approaches to this topic that focus on "closing the gender gap" or aiming for "gender equity" warrant an ideological critique to situate these motivations within the political realm of mathematics education research. Artifacts analyzed in this study were gleaned from a comprehensive electronic library search of over 600 entries, where 178 were retained as yield. A complete ideological critique was performed on a subset of these. Findings include (1) historical alignment of the ideologies evidenced in the research with the ideological influences of the political situation at the time of publication, including scientism, neoliberalism, evolutionism, and solutionism, (2) the ideology of interpellationism which indicates the role of scientific ways of knowing in capitalist political economy, and (3) theoretical foundations of what I call the feminine-quilted-speech indicate how at the present moment in the field, we have the opportunity to shift the ideological underpinnings of research on gender and mathematics. The study avows the role of gender as an agent of capitalist accumulation in school mathematics, through a notion I develop called the masculine-quilted-speech. / Doctor of Philosophy / "Gender and mathematics" is a concern for mathematics education researchers that is old as the field itself, yet it is one that continues to be an active focus for a large swath of researchers. Conundrums abound. Such research includes, for example, neurotic obsessions and phantasies about closing achievement gaps between males and females, whilst other approaches consider the social factors impacting women's and men's relationship to mathematics. I wager that one reason for this plurality of approaches (and the incommensurability of their constituent findings and results) is the inability of existing theoretical perspectives for getting to the root of the problem (the point-de-capiton of the discourse). This dissertation offers a political psychoanalytic counter-perspective to prevailing theoretical approaches on the issue of "gender and mathematics" that critiques the ideologies advanced by researchers in the field through their actions of performing and publishing research on this topic. Findings indicate the extent to which ideology structures the actions of researchers, and the role of gender in the capitalist mode of school mathematics.

This study fundamentally departs from conventional approaches to the "communist-religious" problematic. On the one hand, we reject the orthodox historical materialist denial that communism involves the positive germination of religious practices of any form whatsoever. On the other hand, we also dismiss the "utopian" attempt to convert Marx's theory of this era into a secular extension of Judeo-Christian eschatological principles. Thus, though our central thesis is that Marx's theory of communism logically contains a religious moment, we radically redefine the salient terms of this proposition. This revision stems from our excavation and evaluation of Marx's critique of religion. We limit our purview to Marx and to the sources that influenced him in this area. In Chapter I, we uncover the thematic roots of Marx's critique and trace the rationalist assumptions that were held by his source influences and that were reproduced, mostly unconsciously, in his writings on religion. In Chapter II, we examine the evolution and significance of this thematic legacy in Marx's texts. In particular, we detail the effect of Marx's rationalist premises on his implicit construction of a true/false universality semantic frame. In this context, we demonstrate that Marx's critique consists of two logically distinct, yet historically intertwined, layers, or the substantive and the methodological critiques, respectively. In Chapter III, we evaluate Marx's critique and argue that its substantive side is invalid on both methodological and empirical grounds. This verdict turns on our contention that the Western rat~onalist tradition is one-sided. We also maintain, however, that the methodological side of Marx's critique is valid. We argue that the excision of the substantive critique does not injure the core of Marx's contribution to religious science, but rather makes possible its reclamation. In Chapter IV, we substantiate this point by using Marx's methodological approach as the requisite "ground floor" of a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing the "communist-religious" problematic, and, by extension, for constructing a new religious science. In the course of this exposition, we redefine religion in oikic terms, delineate why it is useful to attribute a religious dimension to communism, sketch the contemporary political implications of our thesis, and outline a model of religious science that synthesizes the fundamental claims of the historical materialist and the "holistic" traditions. / This study fundamentally departs from conventional approaches to the "communist-religious" problematic. On the one hand, we reject the orthodox historical materialist denial that communism involves the positive germination of religious practices of any form whatsoever. On the other hand, we also dismiss the "utopian" attempt to convert Marx's theory of this era into a secular extension of Judeo-Christian eschatological principles. Thus, though our central thesis is that Marx's theory of communism logically contains a religious moment, we radically redefine the salient terms of this proposition. This revision stems from our excavation and evaluation of Marx's critique of religion. We limit our purview to Marx and to the sources that influenced him in this area. In Chapter I, we uncover the thematic roots of Marx's critique and trace the rationalist assumptions that were held by his source influences and that were reproduced, mostly unconsciously, in his writings on religion. In Chapter II, we examine the evolution and significance of this thematic legacy in Marx's texts. In particular, we detail the effect of Marx's rationalist premises on his implicit construction of a true/false universality semantic frame. In this context, we demonstrate that Marx's critique consists of two logically distinct, yet historically intertwined, layers, or the substantive and the methodological critiques, respectively. In Chapter III, we evaluate Marx's critique and argue that its substantive side is invalid on both methodological and empirical grounds. This verdict turns on our contention that the Western rat~onalist tradition is one-sided. We also maintain, however, that the methodological side of Marx's critique is valid. We argue that the excision of the substantive critique does not injure the core of Marx's contribution to religious science, but rather makes possible its reclamation. In Chapter IV, we substantiate this point by using Marx's methodological approach as the requisite "ground floor" of a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing the "communist-religious" problematic, and, by extension, for constructing a new religious science. In the course of this exposition, we redefine religion in oikic terms, delineate why it is useful to attribute a religious dimension to communism, sketch the contemporary political implications of our thesis, and outline a model of religious science that synthesizes the fundamental claims of the historical materialist and the "holistic" traditions. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)