Thesis advisor: Jeffrey Bloechl / Per Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, existentialism is the profound truth that the world lacks inherent meaning and thus, we are radically free to choose, to live life as we please. While these assertions are both true and liberating and the theoretical level, these axioms leave individuals disoriented. They never answer the question: how does one live within an absurd world? Thus, these authors never give us a way of coping with the harsh repercussions of absurdity. To answer this question, this project turns to intersubjectivity and the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’s theory of the other demonstrates that we are not merely beings in a vacuum; the world is conditioned by the interpersonal. Relating to the Other allows us to see that we are not alone in our suffering, for the Other and the individual mutually witness one another. Such connections provide a means of coping with absurdity, allowing us both solidarity and insight into the truly absurd nature of the world. Thus, the application of Levinas’s intersubjectivity to existentialism serves to save Camus’s notion of absurdity from its more nihilistic tendencies, allowing us to accept and apprehend absurdity without falling into despair or ignorance. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Philosophy.

Thesis advisor: John J. Makransky / The purpose of this work is to differentiate the autonomous `self-compassion' of therapeutic modernist Buddhism from pre-therapeutic Mahâyâna Buddhist practices of refuge, so that refuge itself is not obscured as a fundamental Buddhist orientation that empowers the possibility of compassion for self and other in the first place. The work begins by situating issues of shame and self-aversion sociologically, in order to understand how and why self-aversion became a significant topic of concern during the final quarter of the twentieth century. This discussion allows for a further investigation of shame as it has been addressed first by psychologists, for whom shame is often understood as a form of isolating self-aversion, and then by philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Emmanuel Levinas, for whom shame attunes the person to the moral expectations of a community, and therefore to ethical commands that arise from beyond the individual self. Both psychologists and philosophers are ultimately concerned with problems and possibilities of relationship. These discussions prepare the reader to understand the importance of Buddhist refuge as a form of relationship that structures an integrative rather than destructive self-evaluation. The second chapter of the dissertation closely examines Friedrich Nietzsche's work on shame. In a late note, Nietzsche wrote that "man has lost the faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him"; the second chapter argues that Nietzsche's vision of a relatively autonomous will to power cannot fully incorporate this important Nietzschean insight, and helps to drive the kind of self-evaluation typical of modernist `personality culture,' which is likely to become harsh. The third chapter first discusses contemporary therapeutic Buddhist responses to self-aversion, particularly practices of `self-compassion' that claim to be rooted in early Pali canonical and commentarial sources, before developing a commentary on the medieval Tibetan lojong teaching Drive all blames into one. Drive all blames into one, though often discussed in contemporary commentaries as a form of self-blame, should be understood more thoroughly as a simultaneous process of refuge and critique--a process that drives further access to compassion not only for self, but for others as well. Chapter Four discusses mourning and self-reproach in the apophthegmata of the Desert Fathers, showing how `self-hatred' in this context is in a form of irony: the self that is denigrated is not an ultimate reality, and the process of mourning depends upon both an access to love and a clear recognition of our many turns away from that love. In conclusion, I draw attention to the irony of modernist rejections of religious self-critique as supposedly harmful forms of mere shaming, even as the modernist emphasis on autonomy is what enables self-critique to become harsh and damaging. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T21:02:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 27 / Bolsa para curso e programa de Pós Graduação / A questão ética permeia a vida do ser humano e, segundo Kant, se há uma realidade absoluta neste mundo, esta é a realidade de nosso senso moral, da obrigação ética que conduz a nossa consciência para distinguir entre o certo e o errado. A ética kantiana consiste na descoberta do sujeito como valor e na ação do mesmo como responsável pela prática dos seus deveres. É a chamada moral do dever-ser, formada por um conjunto de princípios e regras comportamentais, deduzidas de máximas universais. Para ele, a ética é uma experiência da autonomia do sujeito que é governado por uma razão prática, permitindo a construção de uma lei universal. Kant pensa uma ética finita que envolve um dever e corresponde a um ser humano capaz de autonomia e, por isso, digno de respeito. Por outro lado, Levinas introduz o conceito de alteridade para embasar o seu projeto ético, que se funda na exterioridade, ou seja, a responsabilidade moral nos vem de fora, do outro, nosso próximo. Ele faz uma inversão radical, substituindo o ser pelo / The ethical matter traverses the life of the human being and, according to Kant, if there is an absolute reality worldwide, it is the reality of our moral sense, of the ethical obligation which leads our conscience to distinguish between the right and the wrong. The Kant ethics consists on the discovery of the individual as value, and in his action as the one who is responsible for practicing his duties. It is called “duty - to be” moral, formed by a set of principles and behavior rules, emerged from universal maxima. For him, the ethics is an experience of the autonomy of the individual who is governed by a pratical reason, by allowing the construction of a universal law. Kant thinks a finite ethics which involves a duty and corresponds to a human being capable to autonomy and, for that reason, worthy of respect. On the other hand, Levinas introduces the alterity concept to base his ethical project, which is based on the exteriority, it means, the moral responsibility comes to us from outside, from the oth

¡@What is literature?(Qu'est-ce que la littérature?) is a thesis on literature written by Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, in 1947. By proposing the concept of literary engagement, Sartre attempted to prove that it was natural for literature to engage in the society. Needless to say, such an idea triggered a series of controversy among which the key issue was what the relation between literature and reality was. Regarding this, the current article, starting from the intentionality of the phenomenology, will discuss Sartre¡¦s negativity and Emmanuel Levinas¡¦ shadow concepts in order. It attempts to describe the relation between literature and reality and to unfold such two concepts in parallel at the utmost. However, its purpose is not only to visualize a certain possible mode between literature and reality but to indicate that the difference between literary engagement controversy and others is that it seems to mark the overall symptoms prompted by defining literature with theories. Accordingly, perhaps it is closer to the problematics of literary engagement to find out, apart from repeatedly fixing literature, such a top in movement, to facilitate description, whether it is possible to shed light on the basic fact that literature always conceals itself to draw out reality based on the results that the confrontation between the above-mentioned two theories and literature always leads to, such as communication inability and their being driven away. We thus realize that it is not impossible for the models of Sartre¡¦s and Levinas¡¦ literary objects to converse with such a problematic.

Proefschrift--Wijsbegeerte--Katholieke universiteit Nijmegen, 1999. / Contient un résumé en français et en anglais. Bibliogr. p. 289-296.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Philosophie : Paris 8 : 2007. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. p. 384-393.

The purpose of this essay is to examine Judith Butler’s approach to the problem of ethics, and the ways in which she attempts to reformulate notions of morality and responsibility based on an understanding of the subject as inherently bound to others within a context of normative structures that exceed its own influence. For Butler, this bond implies that the subject’s constitution is structured within what she calls a ”scene of address,” where it emerges into a social field by being appealed to by others, and replying to that appeal by giving an account of itself. By setting out to examine the way in which she puts two influential thinkers—namely Foucault and Levinas—to work, I will examine her notion of scenes of address more closely, and try to show how it enables her to pose the problems of ethics and morality in novel ways. I will argue that her ethics should be understood as one of relationality, since it moves away from the self-sufficient, autonomous subject as the outset for ethics, towards an understanding our very being as dependent on the being of others. This, I propose, puts it in contrast with many established ways of thinking about ethics, both within the Western philosophical tradition, and in views of ethics more generally. Thus, I hope to show that Butler’s ethics constitutes a valuable resource with regard to the question of ethical responsibility. Finally, I will propose that it carries significant implications that point towards ethical nonviolence, and that these are of increasing importance to us today.

This thesis interrogates how Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes represents histories of violence ethically by utilizing Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy of ethics as a methodology for interpretation. Traditional slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography and postmodern neo-slave narratives like Toni Morrison’s Beloved animate the violence endemic to slavery and colonialism in an effort to emphasize struggles in conscience, the incomprehensible atrocities, and strategies of rebellion. However, this project illustrates how The Book of Negroes supplements these literary goals with Hill’s own imagination of how slaves contested the inhumanities thrust upon them. Through his aesthetic choices as a realist, Hill foregrounds the possibilities of pacifism, singular identities, and altruistic agency through his protagonist Aminata Diallo. These three narrative elements constitute Lévinas’s ethical peace, which means displaying a profound sensitivity towards the historical Other whom imperial discourses and traditional representations of catastrophes in Black history might obscure. / Graduate / 0325 / 0328 / 0352 / jaslife12@hotmail.com

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Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Philo. pol.--Paris 7, 1997. / Bibliogr. p. 319-331.