Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-87). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: LINK NOT YET AVAILABLE.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2008. / Title from PDF title page (viewed September 22, 2008) Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-67)

published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

In recent decades, the politics of recognition has become an important theme in political and social theorizing about justice and freedom. The desire for recognition, that is to say, the desire to have the approval, esteem, consideration or respect of those around us, whether as individuals or members of social groups, has in fact been described as a vital human need. The distribution of rights and obligations, wealth and resources, all turn on the theme of recognition; failures to recognize the humanity of others or their particular identities as worthy of respect or esteem often result in political and social outcomes that are deeply unjust. The central idea behind these debates is that an individual’s identity – her self-understanding of who she is – and her social and political standing in any organized community – the rights she has and the protections she possesses under the law – are all in part shaped by the recognition or misrecognition of others. As Charles Taylor describes it, a social and political world that reflects back to individuals a demeaning picture of themselves can lead to severe psychic damage and cause real harm; a political society that simply refuses to recognize the identities of certain groups of individuals as having any standing at all can result in radical denials of the basic rights individuals are entitled to as members of a political community. Indeed, many of the major cultural, ethnic, racial, gender and religious movements of the last decade are seen by scholars as organized around the principle of recognition – the struggle to have one’s identity be recognized by others as worthy of respect. In trying to make sense of the politics of recognition, scholars have, for the most part, turned to Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition for guidance. His most prominent remarks on this subject occur in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he discusses the struggle for recognition through what is famously known as the master-slave dialectic. While Hegel certainly offers an extremely sophisticated and important account of the subject, and although many have shifted the debate to other areas of Hegel’s corpus, the general neglect of philosophical treatments on this issue by other thinkers in the history of thought is regrettable. In this dissertation, I examine some of the most important precursors to Hegel on this subject, arguing that they did indeed take the struggle for recognition seriously. Moreover, I hope to show that their reflections on the subject are themselves important and worthy of consideration, not only historically, but also for how we might think about the struggle for recognition today. This dissertation focuses on the social and political thought of Bernard Mandeville, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. It has two main aims. First and most principally, I aim to throw new light on each of their political philosophies by examining their ideas through the lens of the struggle for recognition. Each of them, I will argue, in varying ways set the desire for recognition at the centre of their thought. Second, I attempt to account for the continuities and discontinuities of between their views on the subject.

[Truncated abstract] Recent studies have provided evidence that face-coding mechanisms reference a norm or average face (Leopold, O`Toole, Vetter & Blanz, 2001; Rhodes & Jeffery, 2006). The central aim of this thesis was to establish whether distinct norms, and dissociable neural mechanisms code faces of different race and sex categories. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to norm based coding of faces, and reviews evidence for the existence of distinct norms for different races and sexes. Chapter 1 then introduces adaptation as a tool for investigating these ideas. Chapter 2 presents two adaptation studies that examined how faces of different races are coded. The aim of these studies was to determine whether dissociable neural mechanisms (or distinct face norms) code faces of different races. Chinese and Caucasian participants rated the normality of Caucasian and Chinese test faces, before and after adaptation to distorted faces of one race (e.g., 'contracted' Chinese faces; Experiment 1) or distorted faces of both races (e.g., 'contracted' Chinese faces and 'expanded' Caucasian faces; Experiment 2). Following adaptation to faces of one race, there were changes in perceived normality for faces of both races (i.e., perceptual aftereffects), indicating that common neural mechanisms code Chinese and Caucasian faces. However, aftereffects were significantly smaller in faces of the unadapted race suggesting some sensitivity to the race of faces. This sensitivity was also evident in Experiment 2. ... Some dissociability was also found in the coding of faces of different iv sexes. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants adapted to oppositely distorted faces of both sexes. Weak sex-selective aftereffects were found. Taken together, the findings suggest that male and female faces are coded by dissociable but not completely distinct neural populations. Chapter 4 examined whether the aftereffects reported for faces of different races or sexes reflected the adaptation of high-level neural mechanisms tuned to the social category information in faces, or earlier coding mechanisms tuned to simple physical differences between face groups. Chinese and Caucasian participants adapted to oppositely distorted face sets that were the same distance apart on a morph continua. The face sets were either from different race categories (e.g., contracted Chinese faces and expanded Caucasian faces), or from the same race category, (e.g., contracted Chinese faces and expanded caricatured Chinese faces). Larger opposite aftereffects were found when face sets were from different race categories, than when they were from the same race category suggesting that oppositely adapted neural mechanisms are tuned to social category differences rather than simple physical differences in faces. Together, these studies shed new light on how we code faces from different face categories. Specifically, the findings indicate that faces of different races and sexes are coded by both common and race- or sex-selective neural mechanisms. In addition, the findings are consistent with the possibility that race- and sex-selective norms and dimensions are used to code faces in face space. The implications of these findings and possible avenues for future research are discussed.

The thesis argues that to find the places in media culture where the face transmits death, we need to look beyond the immobilised faces of the dead. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of the image, the thesis sees the phenomenon of becoming unrecognisable as a particular practice of the image in which the face becomes a viable site for making death transmissible. It is argued that by paying attention to instances in media culture in which a face becomes unrecognisable, we can see how death is made visible as a dialectic between recognition and unrecognisability, appearance and disappearance. By examining the complexity of this particular form of dialectical image in a wide range of media - photography, television and film - the thesis shifts discussion away from questions of representation and faciality that feature so strongly in recent theorisations of the face. Focussing on questions of recognition and recognisability, the thesis proposes a way of thinking about the face that leads to a new conception of death in the media age / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Typescript (photocopy)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1928. / Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. 80-81.