My dissertation seeks to restore the sentiment of pity to Rousseau’s moral and political system. Rousseau scholarship tends to offer a proto-Kantian interpretation of Rousseau’s concepts of moral liberty and the general will. I argue that these readings neglect Rousseau’s own definition of virtue as the product of an individual’s pity moderating rational self-interest (amour de soi). I offer an account of Rousseau’s moral liberty dependent on this concept of virtue that incorporates the sentiments. I then argue that pity must perform a similar role in the general will because it is through the general will that people express their moral agency. To do so, I explore how Rousseau’s account of pity as a social sentiment is more expansive and active than standard interpretations allow, and thus it is better described as expanded pity or sympathy. Understanding pity’s role in the general will also affects Rousseau’s accounts of equality and individuality. Because virtue demands that pity moderate impulses to excess, the general will that arises from a virtuous citizenry will tend toward distributive equality. A state then best achieves equality by cultivating virtue through private institutions like education and public institutions like civil religion. Finally, I argue that Rousseau’s account of pity alleviates the perceived conflict, first posed by Judith Shklar, between the individual life of man and the homogenized life of citizen. In its expanded form, pity motivates individuals to care about others’ pursuits of their own personal interests while also maintaining a separation between self and other. Exploration into Rousseau’s pity thus has important implications for the kind of political emotions we should look to revitalize in modern democratic society.

v anglickém jazyce Proposed thesis focuses on the writings of french theoretician Jacques Rancière. Particular emphasis is put on a manner, in which the spheres of aesthetics and politics appear and intervine in Rancière's works. The consequence of forementioned delimitation of the subject of my interest is that the thesis doesn't fully embody Rancière's thought. Mainly because of the restricted space, i omitted Rancière's historiographical works and also texts that deal with the narrowly defined questions of literature and film. Despite of those limitations, my goal is to provide a monographical introduction to Rancière's thought. This monograph, on the one hand, doesn't claim the complete coverage of Rancière's works, but it aims, on the other hand, to provide the overall insight into the essential questions that shaped (and still shape) Rancière's thought.

This dissertation explores the history of social-constructionist theories of sexual difference through the surprising connection between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the lesbian-feminist writer and theorist Monique Wittig. Wittig developed a social contract theory that radically denaturalized sexual difference, an approach she credited to Rousseau. I offer an interpretation of her appropriation of Rousseau that frames it within the French women’s liberation movement. Then, re-reading him through her lens, I argue that Rousseau too viewed sexual difference as a social construction. Chapter 1 argues that Wittig’s concept of “the lesbian” is modeled after Rousseau’s “natural man.” Wittig used this notion in the “lesbian question” quarrel in the women’s movement to depict human freedom after the abolition of sexual difference. In chapter 2, I show how Wittig interprets the social contract as a political and epistemological concept that encodes the presuppositions, like heterosexuality or race, which shape the social order and knowledge production. Through this concept, she engages in a debate with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss over Rousseau’s legacy. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Rousseau retooled the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s methodology and data in order to denaturalize sexual difference. From there, he posited that sex originates in the transition from proper nouns to common nouns, and is therefore a linguistic construction. This construction allows humans to understand virtue, because without it, humans are unable to access their moral sense. In chapter 4, I argue that his novel Julie represents his most sustained effort to harness material science to favor the development of moral sense. The novel synthesizes spiritual exercises’ emphasis on linguistic representations with materialist ideas about language’s influence on the body. It calls on readers to use spiritual exercises to shape their sexual identities in order to conform with rigidly defined gender roles. In the conclusion, I bring Wittig and Rousseau together within a loosely existentialist framework. I argue that by severing the chain of necessity between biology and sex, they posit a meaninglessness underlying our sexual identities; they react differently to this abyss, but it is in their realization of it that their work has a striking relevance today.

Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Bloechl / According to Catholic social doctrine, there are two principles which serve as foundational pillars of social thought and action: the dignity of human being and the primacy of the common good. Each human person has unique and endless worth in the eye of God, since “God created each human person in His image, in the image of God he created humankind, male and female. He created them” (Genesis, 1: 27). God creates all things and wanted them to participate in His glory and happiness (well-being). Thus, by their nature, all human beings want to be happy. To reach happiness is “something final and self-sufficient and the end of our actions” (NE 1097b20), but we should not forget that by nature man is a part of the greater order. How can one defend both the dignity of the human person and the primacy of the common good? To defend the dignity of human person the first question must be answered what is meant a human person, since the ways in which we understand ourselves as persons have direct effects on the ways in which we organize ourselves collectively in the political communities. To answer what is a human person we will understand how Maritain makes the distinction between individual and person, and what it is that constitutes a human person. It leads to understand the whole human being, soul and body, is a person. Man is as a part of the greater order. According to Aristotle and followed by Aquinas, every creature is only a part of the whole perfection of the universe, just as one instrument in an orchestra is a part of the whole perfection of the harmony. “Society is a whole composed of persons is to say that society is a whole composed of wholes” (Evans and Ward, The Social and Political Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, p. 85). Because the relationship between the common good and the dignity of the human person is the relationship of our dignity of finality and our dignity of nature. We distinguish between the human acts and the acts of human being in order to understand the notion of Aquinas’s the human act. Then, we will understand why Maritain defends natural law as an antidote for a secular society and present crisis of pluralist society. According to Maritain, the deepest result of the crisis from the modern to the present time is man’s natural community in the natural law and his innate ordination to the transcendent as the source of ultimate value have been casted into doubt. Thus, the only appropriate way to reconcile the common good and my good is to turn God into my private good as a kind of a good infinitely shareable, as if there were commensurability between my finite and infinite goodness. To make this reconciliation into the present age, “you must love your neighbor as, like yourselves,” ordered to a common good. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

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La presente investigación tiene como propósito enriquecer y facilitar el proceso creativo de los actores y actrices al momento de abordar una obra realista. A través del laboratorio, se propone investigar si la ejecución y posterior interiorización de “los movimientos naturales de la vida” propuestos por Jacques Lecoq, podría ayudar a aumentar los procesos internos y las emociones, lo cual llevaría al actor y a la actriz a tener una mayor organicidad. Todo esto relacionado, principalmente, a cómo los actores y actrices la encuentran partiendo desde el movimiento y lo aplican en monólogos de La gaviota de Chéjov. De igual manera, se busca explorar cómo la aplicación consciente de “los movimientos naturales de la vida” propicia el encontrarla en escena, y, sobre todo, conocer mediante la práctica que la organicidad es uno de los factores principales al actuar una escena realista. De esta manera, se observa el proceso en el que un movimiento técnico, se transforma en una forma de respirar, de sentir y de canalizar la energía, y ver de qué manera, todo esto, repercute en el actor y la actriz, y sea un camino propicio para investigar la organicidad en escena.

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Thesis advisor: Andrew Prevot / Decisions: Political Theology and the Challenges of Postmodernity, argues that political theologies are both partially responsible for and responsive to the intrinsically related problems of racism, capitalism, and essentialist metaphysical thinking. Relying on dialectical materialist and post-structuralist theories, Decisions critically engages a wide range of classical and contemporary figures such as Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, James Cone, Chantal Mouffe, Cornel West, Martin Hågglund, and Karl ove Knausgaard. These engagements are attentive to not only the particular theoretical and political decisions any one thinker makes, but also to the ways in which “decision” is itself understood as an important theoretical and political category. Although “decisionism” has become a popular motif in contemporary political theology, the concept remains under theorized. This is unfortunate, because contemporary ontological racisms and exploitative market structures aim to prevent political decisions: ontological racism decides in advance the essential “racial” characteristics of a person and market economies ensure that the distribution of goods is “decided” by the so- called invisible hand of the market. Moreover, both racisms and capitalism can imply an underlying modern metaphysics of substance and essence. While the postmodern critique of metaphysics is often read as a challenge to religion, this reading suggests that postmodernity presents an opportunity for the reemergence of an historical and politically engaged form of religion. Such an emancipatory and non-metaphysical approach can be found throughout various religious traditions, but is especially prominent amongst black political theologians working out of the Christian tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Jacques Handschin (1886 Moskau/Russland–1955 Basel/Schweiz) war ein hervorragender schweizerisch-russischer Organist und Musikwissenschaftler aus der Max Reger unmittelbar nachfolgenden Generation. Die Hauptperiode seiner wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit verbrachte Handschin nach 1920 in der Schweiz: Hier verfasste er seine bedeutendsten Arbeiten, und seit 1935 leitete er hier das musikwissenschaftliche Seminar der Universität Basel. Doch seine Jugend hatte Handschin in Russland verbracht, hier war er geboren worden, wuchs er auf und leitete elf Jahre (1909–1920) die Orgelklasse des Petersburger Konservatoriums. Die Forschungen zeigten, dass Jacques Handschin – ein Musiker, der dann zum (Musik)Wissenschaftler wurde – im gewissen Sinne für sein Leben lang ein praktizierender Musiker blieb, und als ein solcher stand er unter dem starken Einfluss von Max Reger. Wie äußerte sich dieser Einfluss, mit welchen Ereignissen war dies verbunden, und wie genau bestimmte dieser Einfluss das weitere Leben und Werk Handschins?