Philosophy Theses and Dissertations

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2041

This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon Philosophy Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.

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Open Access
The Drama of the Dialectic: Hegel, Marx, and the Theory of Appropriation
(University of Oregon, 2024-12-19) Knowlton Jr, Kenneth; Muraca, Barbara
This dissertation develops a theory of appropriation through an account of dialectical materialism as a relational ontology. Appropriation is argued as creative-aesthetic activity definitive of the human species-essence through which sociality metabolically transforms. In turn, the universality of appropriation becomes an analytic for designating historical change through the mode of appropriation, where the transhistorical and ontological dimension of appropriation take on a historically specific character. I begin with a critical reconstruction of German Idealism through an account of FWJ Schelling’s critique of GWF Hegel’s Science of Logic. Schelling’s criticism initiates a tendency to misrepresent Hegel’s dialectical logic that extends into 20th century philosophy, a misrepresentation which also transposed itself onto the works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. I trace this lineage in Part I, critically responding to it. Part II provides a materialist interpretation of Hegel’s Science of Logic, focusing on essence, necessity, universality, telos, and reason. I demonstrate the relational and anti-representational character of Hegelian dialectics through a systematic account of these categories. Consequently, I draw on Hegel to provide the logico-theoretical structure of the concept of appropriation as constitutive of a dialectical relational ontology. Part III develops appropriation and the mode of appropriation through an engagement with the works of Marx and Engels. I argue that their work is predicated on a dialectical relational ontology fundamental to their political, economic, and historical analysis. I show that the mode of appropriation is constituted by a triadic structure of changing labor-forms, property-forms, and belonging-forms that together elucidate socio-historical transformation.
Open Access
A Critical Feminist Semiology: De-naturalizing and Re-Politicizing Patriarchal, White Supremacist, and Settler-Colonial Systems of Meaning
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Ring, Annalee; Stawarska, Beata
This dissertation de-naturalizes and re-politicizes patriarchal, white supremacist and settler-colonial systems of meaning through creating a methodology of critical feminist semiology. This methodology is built from the contributions of many thinkers’ works in semiology, phenomenology, philosophy of myth, feminist philosophy, and critical philosophy of race. I return to the emergence of semiology in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work to show that it has been more political than the dominant reading takes semiology to be. My reading of his work emphasizes the importance of studying politics, history, institutions, colonialism, and geography in the study of signs as a part of social life. I critique Roland Barthes for depoliticizing the method of semiology while acknowledging his many contributions, especially in the study of myths. Barthes’ emphasis on the operation of myths to naturalize and depoliticize politically motivated contingencies is a major contribution to the method of critical feminist semiology. This project turns to Simone de Beauvoir’s work The Second Sex and reads it as a semiological phenomenology. Beauvoir’s work closely considers signs as a part of social life through demonstrating the contingency of the myth of the eternal feminine as well as its political, economic, social, and ontological operations. She shows how this myth shapes lived experiences and how it might be resisted. This chapter demonstrates that the myth of the eternal feminine operates as a part of a patriarchal system of meaning. The dissertation then turns to the field of Black feminist thought, which considers how myths sustain and reinforce race and gender oppression in a more collective manner than the semiologists previously considered. This chapter identifies clusters of myths that support one another and that support what I call the meta-myth of white supremacy. White supremacy is both a singular myth and a meta-myth that is supported by clusters of myths. To dismantle the meta-myth of white supremacy, it is vital to understand how it is supported by and supports clusters of myths; that is, treating it as an individual myth is insufficient. This dissertation then engages with Indigenous and decolonial scholars to show how clusters of myth sustain settler colonialism. The cluster of myths considered in this chapter also supports the meta-myth of white supremacy. Decolonial scholars demonstrate the importance of purging mythologies that contribute to the material success of settler-colonialism. Throughout the dissertation, myths are considered material; rather than treated as abstractions alone, myths have significant impacts on material conditions and as such should be given moral scrutiny.
Open Access
Critical Phenomenology of Illness: Towards a Politics of Care
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) McLay , Sarah; Stawarska, Beata
Working at the intersection of phenomenology and critical disability studies, this dissertation develops a critical phenomenology of illness and health. Moving beyond classical phenomenologies of illness—which center on the first-person experience of a consciousness abstracted from social and historical structures—I argue that responsibly examining illness (and health) demands concretely attending to the ways that particular illness experiences are instituted from within a socio-historical field. Importantly, beyond describing the lived experience of illness, critical phenomenology must track the material-historical structures and norms that foreclose possibilities for coping and living with illness. This involves reckoning with how oppressive structures—in disproportionate ways—debilitate bodies and make them sick. When we do this work, it becomes clear that we must broaden the scope of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) call for “an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” (167). That is, given that phenomenology can’t extract itself from the natural attitude, and given that natural attitudes are implicitly shaped by debilitating structures of oppression, if phenomenology demands rehabilitation, then rehabilitation can’t just take place at the theoretical level. Instead, a radically responsible phenomenology of health/illness demands that we work towards dismantling debilitating systems, and creating a world where all bodies might flourish.
Embargo
Making and Unmaking Worlds: Towards Liberation Beyond Subjectivity
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Friaz, Ricardo; Russell, Camisha
This dissertation develops the concept of liberation by questioning what it means to destroy, abolish, and create worlds. I develop a critical position towards agential or subject-based accounts of liberation in order to think through Abolitionist and Decolonial accounts of mourning and collective world-making. I trace the endurance of historical processes of slavery and colonialism and their violent effects today, and I discuss contemporary police torture and migrant camps to reflect on practices of observing world destruction that do not center a subject of liberation. I give a critical account of the contemporary organization of the world around the Cartesian subject, and develop an alternative account of the world by drawing on Spinoza’s account of substance and bodily knowing. I conclude by developing an account of world creation by engaging with Lugones’ account of world-traveling and playfulness along with Winnicott’s theories of the playground and transitional object.
Open Access
The Problem of Freedom and Universality: Marxian Philosophical Anthropology
(University of Oregon, 2024-03-25) Ralda, Oscar; Muraca, Barbara
This dissertation has two principal aims. First, it provides a critical reconsideration of Marx’s philosophical anthropology as it bears on the essential continuity of his emancipatory critique of political economy. Second, it makes an argument for well-suitedness of Marxian philosophical anthropology in critically assessing the systematic irrationality of capitalist society, that is, its incorrigible failure to meet substantive human needs and its ecologically destructive accumulative imperatives. It is argued, then, that the normative underpinnings of Marx’s critique of capitalist society derive from his philosophical anthropology and that the latter therefore proves indissociable from the positive necessity of the socialist alternative.Traditionally conceived, philosophical anthropology involves a form of inquiry concerned with articulating the qualities distinctive of, and essential to, human beings. A Marxian philosophical anthropology, however, does not propose a rigid taxonomy of human qualities, but instead develops a critical dialectic capable of grasping the immanent, developmental character of the necessary material and ontological determinations constitutive of human sociality, paradigmatically expressed in the cooperative form of the labor process as the very locus of the process of conscious human self-mediation. Hence, the actualization of universal human freedom pertains to the conscious socialization––or the substantive humanization––of those determinations which form both the limits of social existence generally and which, in their distorted and antagonistically constituted form, become sources of a dysfunctional, irrational, and deficient form of human self-mediation; that is, they assume the form of alienated actualizations of our social nature or essence. In the case of Marxian critique, the necessarily social character of the labor process constitutes not only the primary object of critique in its antagonistically constituted and alienated form, but also constitutes the point of immanence needed for specifying the necessary transcendence of capitalist social relations and hence the destructive social metabolism sustained by capital and its alienated compulsions. In reconstructing Marx’s early work and its constitutive philosophical anthropological concepts, in returning to his metacritique of G. W. F. Hegel, and in tracing the ambivalent reception of the ‘essentialist’ and ‘naturalist premises’ of Marx’s claims within Marxist theory and critical theory more broadly, the dissertation makes the case that the historical materialist critique of capitalist society requires a positive notion of human self-mediation, and that such a notion is supplied by Marx’s philosophical anthropology. Essential to this philosophical anthropology is not only an account of self-mediation as the open-ended development of human needs and powers, but also as the very need for social relations in which social individuals, conscious of their universal interdependence, become for each other the positive condition of their reciprocal self-actualizing freedom, transcending thereby the antagonisms whereby sociality appears as an alienated, altogether external constraint. It is in this way that universal, substantive socialist freedom becomes intelligible––a human necessity.
Embargo
Living Legality: Law and Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Ospina Martinez, Juan Sebastián; Vallega, Alejandro
In this dissertation I examine the theoretical underpinnings necessary for a philosophy of liberationaccount of law and suggest an alternative conceptualization of the function of law and political institutions, following the normative contributions of Enrique Dussel’s political philosophy of liberation. I argue that, while Dussel has not yet developed a complete account of legality proper in his political philosophy, his work contains resources for developing a liberatory philosophy of law. Specifically, this dissertation explores the normative dimensions of this question by offering a systematization of Dussel´s philosophy of liberation of law through which is possible to conceive an alternative form of constituent power and institutions that result from this decolonial tradition. In pursuing this inquiry, I connect concepts from liberation philosophy to questions about the meaning of legal notions that are understood as the basic framework of our political life. I examine the notion of constituent power and its potential to redefine political and legal institutions.
Embargo
Making Sense of the Practical Lesbian Past: Towards a Rethinking of Untimely Uses of History through the Temporality of Cultural Techniques
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Simon, Valérie; Koopman, Colin
This dissertation focuses on the practice of untimely uses of lesbian history, and in particular the diverse practices of engagement with lesbian activist history, all of which aim to mobilize this activist history for the present and towards the construction of alternate futures. I approach such practices technologically by foregrounding the method and theory of ‘cultural techniques’ in a way that reframes the problem oriented by engagement with lesbian activist history. Specifically, I develop a reframing that shifts the focus from a question of representation (how to ensure the histories engaged with are more diverse?) to a question of how to engage with lesbian history in ways that guide and inspire action in the present and towards the future worlds that we deserve. I argue that to answer the latter question what is needed is attention to the practices (and in particular the technologies) we find in archives and to evaluate what these practices might do in the present through an understanding of these practices’ temporality, historicity and the ethico-political questions they raise.
Open Access
Nietzsche, Reification, and Open Comportment
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Currie, Luke; Stern, Michael
This work primarily discusses the “fallacy of reification” from the perspective of Nietzsche’s late philosophy (particularly in the chapter on ‘Reason’ in philosophy in his Twilight of the Idols). While reification is typically a logical, metaphysical, or epistemological problem in Modern Western philosophy, the author attempts to show that reification is also a problem in ethics. An outline of a groundwork for an ethical “open comportment” is gestured toward by way of Nietzsche’s critiques of “anti-natural morality” and the “conceptual mummies” of philosophy. The likes of William James, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Henri Bergson are discussed to expand on the points made by Nietzsche and to show how his thought could be developed further, though the scope of the paper remains mostly within the perspective of late Nietzschean philosophy. Additionally, the likes of Hesiod, Kant, and aspects of Christianity are mentioned to serve as examples to situate Nietzsche’s campaign to “re-evaluate all values” (a simultaneously destructive and creative endeavor) in the thesis.When a reified concept replaces the “real” entity from which it is abstracted, the original entity risks being missed in favor of the concept. For example, if an outsider has a prejudice about what a certain group of people are like without being open to experiencing them in their multiplicity and diversity, any given person from that group is at risk of being reduced to the prejudice of the outsider, and thereby is treated and understood according to the outsider’s prejudice (regardless of its accuracy in relation to the particular person on whom this prejudice is imposed). The prejudice, in this example, is a reified concept. It is not recognized as an ossified abstraction, but instead appears as a simple, given truth. This blindness to the origin of concepts and their sublimation of difference under abstract sameness is as much of an ethical issue as an issue for the development of human knowledge. Bergson’s peculiar “infinite” shows that things are not reducible to concepts alone, and thereby suggests a possible avenue for open engagement insofar as we develop a comportment toward the irreducible indeterminacy of becoming.
Open Access
An Argument for a Cartographic Approach to Technology
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) McLevey, Mare; Morar, Nicolae
This dissertation develops a way to study technology and politics that is an alternative to dominant approaches particular to contemporary philosophy of technology’s empirical and ethical turns. Dominant models fix technologies as stable objects to be related to in ethical ways or as objects whose designs should be reformed over time. Alternatively, I develop what I call a cartographic approach to technology (CAT). CAT situates technologies as components of larger dynamic ensembles the transformations of which must be diagrammed and mapped. The cartographic task is not simply to describe existing relations; it involves the creation of new assemblages through the experimental construction of maps linking technologies with other forces and elements in the wholes of which they are a part. I argue CAT underscores how technological objects themselves are the products of multi-scalar processes of arrangement. Furthermore, these processes are always political and might be points of intervention at any and every moment. CAT throws technologies back into the ensembles enmeshing them and forces productive links between heterogeneous elements. This linking work might carry libidinal, material, psychic, structural, and other types of weight in the real. And it should be undertaken with a view to the production of new cartographies. My argument unfolds across four chapters. In Chapter 2, I develop four tenets of CAT drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s analytic focus on transformations and their concepts of machines, assemblages, and cartography. I illustrate these tenets in Chapters 3 and 4 through comparative studies of CAT alongside Postphenomenology and Critical Theory of Technology, respectively. In Chapter 5, I propose that collective counter-mapping projects such as those of the Counter-Cartographies Collective and Iconoclasistas suggest concrete possibilities for CAT as a site of collective knowledge production about technology. All four chapters together outline an image of philosophy of technology as experimental, creative, collective, and guided by explicit political commitments.
Open Access
Time, Capitalism, and Political Ecology: Toward and Ecosocialist Metabolic Temporality
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Gamble, Cameron; Muraca, Barbara
The ecological crises that have already marked the 21st century, and which will continue to do so on an increasingly intense and destructive scale, present theory in every discipline and field of study with a number of problems. Due to the complex historical origins and specific characteristics of these crises, many of the theoretical problems that arise with them, I contend, have to do with time and temporality, and not just in terms of how we conceive of time and temporality, but with the ways in which we socially and practically organize them, at the level of both the individual and collective, that is, the time of the worker and the time of social production.In this dissertation, I present an analysis of the problem of time in the warming world and of the temporal logic of capital to gain a better understanding of capitalism’s socio-metabolic temporality and the ways in which this specific organization of our interchange with nature produces ecological degradation and destruction. I argue that capital’s temporal logic and accumulation imperative, which have produced a global metabolic rift between nature and society, also results in the production of temporal- ecological rifts. In its ceaseless process of valorizing value, I show that capital subsumes ecological temporalities – that is, the life-cycles and rhythms of nature – under its own alienated, abstract temporality in order to make nature conform to capital’s time and accumulation imperatives. In light of this, I assert that the warming world we now inhabit requires a strain of Political Ecology able to break with capital’s temporal logic if we are to foster a just socio-ecological transition that ensures a habitable planet for future generations. For this, we require a dialectical conception of the relation between society and nature and an eco-chronopolitic that considers the ecological long-term – not just the dictates of capital’s immediate, short-term expansion. In aiming to ecologically rationalize our socio-metabolic exchange with nature, I argue that we require an ecosocialist society and that Metabolic Rift Theory presents the best theoretical and practical guide for this task.
Open Access
Pragmatism, Genealogy, and Moral Status
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Showler, Paul; Koopman, Colin
This dissertation draws from recent work in pragmatism and philosophical genealogy to develop and defend a new approach for thinking about the concept of moral status. My project has two main aims. First, I argue that Huw Price’s recent theory of philosophical naturalism, subject naturalism, can avoid several challenges by looking to the resources of philosophical genealogy, especially as it is developed in the work of Bernard Williams. Second, employing the methodological insights gained from this amended version of Price’s project, I defend a genealogical account of moral status. Rather than theorize the grounds of moral status on the basis of an individual’s properties or provide a conceptual analysis of moral status, my starting point is to look to the function that the concept plays within moral practice. In particular, I argue that it plays an indispensable, but overlooked role in allowing agents to deliberate about their practical identities and to articulate conceptions of moral progress. Taking this “function-first” approach, I argue, not only sheds light on various theoretical disagreements within applied ethics, but it advances debates concerning political and legal projects of affording rights to non-human animals, the natural environment (e.g., ecosystems), and machines displaying intelligence.
Open Access
Demystifying Racial Monopoly
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Haller, Reese; Russell, Camisha
Through analysis of private, public, and state reactions to the Great Depression and northward black migration, this thesis demystifies four key functions of race constitutive of capitalist racial monopoly: historical availability, division of labor, motivation of surplus absorption, and embodiment of false consciousness. Nonetheless, the working class’s immanent limitations and transcendent activities in this paradigm later gave rise to the 1950s and 60s racial liberation movement’s social constructionist critiques. The following counterintelligence reactions of the Federal Bureau of Investigation neutralized, abstracted, and mystified such racial politics, rendering their truncated identarian form available to a variety of political groups from the anti-racist left to the ethnonationalist right. In this way, capital now appropriates resistant racial politics as part of a commodified and mutually antagonistic multiracial plurality. To resuscitate multiracial coalitional politics that can challenge capital’s racial monopoly, today’s anti-racism must reassess the historical development of racial monopoly in the mid-twentieth century.
Open Access
Soul and Polis: On Arete in Plato's Meno
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Smith III, Ansel; Warnek, Peter
In “Soul and Polis: On Arete in Plato’s Meno,” I interpret Meno as a dialogue in which the pursuit of individual arete appears intertwined with political arete. While the differentiation of these two arete is itself noteworthy, my analysis also draws out the dialectical tension between the soul and the polis, a tension which is constitutive of the pursuit of the human good. Socrates’ philosophical practice emphasizes the power of the individual to subvert and undermine the claim of the polis on the soul; and yet, Socrates remains beholden to his interlocutors (and Athens), constantly imploring them to share in the search for arete. The mutual dependence of Socrates on his interlocutor and his interlocutors on Socrates bespeaks a surprising interaction between one’s self relation and one’s relation to others. One can neither become a good person in isolation from others nor because of the honor or “good reputation” of others alone. My interpretation of Meno departs from much of the Anglophone scholarship on this text by focusing on the ubiquitous political implicature throughout the dialogue rather than on its epistemological significance. The latter emphasizes Socrates’ account of recollection (ἀνάμνησις) as the decisive textual insight. By contrast, my analysis draws on the intertextual resonance of Ancient Greek sources as a way to draw out Meno’s significance in an ongoing political discourse. My interpretation progresses through Meno linearly, tracking the development of problems concerning arete as they appear in the discussion. Socrates first engages with Meno, inviting him to account for arete, but after Meno fails to satisfy Socrates, Socrates takes it upon himself to persuade Meno to search for arete with a different dialogical comportment than the one Gorgias had inculcated in him. This task draws others into the dialogue as well—a slave/boy (παῖς) and an Athenian statesman named Anytus. By the end of the dialogue, it seems unlikely that Socrates has changed Meno in any meaningful way, but my analysis of Socrates’ engagement with his interlocutors draws out the urgency of Socrates’ concern for arete as a political task.
Open Access
Ethics for the Depressed: A Value Ethics of Engagement
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Fitzpatrick, Devin; Johnson, Mark
I argue that depressed persons suffer from “existential guilt,” which amounts to a two-part compulsion: 1) the compulsive assertion or sense of a vague and all-encompassing or absolute threat that disrupts action and intention formation, and 2) the compulsive taking of such disruption to be a reason for inaction. I develop in response an “ethics for the depressed,” an ethical theory directed to those suffering from existential guilt. The first part of this dissertation, comprising Chapters 2 through 4, largely concerns the first aspect of existential guilt: it is a metaethics for the depressed, or “ethics as a reliable guide” as a response to “demoralization” and “hypermoralized deliberation.” There I challenge what I call the Stocker-Smith account of depressive loss of motivation as being a loss of desires and argue instead that it involves the defeating presence of what the phenomenologist Matthew Ratcliffe calls “pre-intentional” mental states, a category that I redefine and expand to include second-order “quasi-beliefs” and habits of feeling, that interfere with intention formation and action despite the persistence of desire. The second part of this dissertation, comprising Chapters 5 and 6, largely concerns the second aspect of existential guilt: it is a normative ethics for the depressed, or a “value ethics of engagement” premised on “contingent value ranking.” After demonstrating in the first part that depressed persons may retain their desires and values in depression, I premise a value ethics upon what I call the consistent desire for a “sense of stability” in response to experiences of precarity and isolation. From the phenomenology of value, I develop a concept of the heart as the set of “felt values” or intuitive value paradigms that are themselves pre-intentional states or dispositions. I thus attempt to structure a complete ethical theory, integrating plural philosophical traditions and founded on the phenomenological category of pre-intentional mental states, in response to the presence of existential guilt and its component compulsions as experienced by an otherwise reasonable interlocutor. I put an orthodox style of philosophy in service of an unorthodox agent: one who is “aspiringly autonomous.”
Open Access
Place-in-Being: A Decolonial Phenomenology of Place in Conversation with Philosophies of the Americas
(University of Oregon, 2022-05-10) Newton, Margaret; Mann, Bonnie
Our experiences of place and emplacement are so fundamental to our everyday existence that most of us rarely dedicate much time to thinking about how place and emplacement impact the various aspects of our daily lives. In this work, I apply a decolonial lens to philosophy of place literature and argue that philosophical approaches to place should recognize and consider, what I term, the coloniality of space, the pluriversality of place, and place-in-being. The coloniality of space describes the pattern of valuing the concept of “space” over “place” in Western philosophical literature as motivated by projects of colonization. The Western philosophers that I discuss in my second chapter, value the concept of space over place since space is ascribed the characteristics of universality and limitless expansion. I note that this affinity towards space, and especially the erasure of place, is connected to coloniality and colonization. My third chapter argues in favor of critical phenomenologies of place, while my fourth chapter, in conversation with North American Indigenous philosophies, applies a decolonial lens to Western philosophical literature of place and defends what I call the pluriversality of place. The pluriversality of place conceptualizes the existence of multiple ways of theorizing place, as well as naming the experiences some might have of singular places manifesting in plural ways. Lastly, my fifth chapter draws on two philosophies from the Americas, American pragmatism and Latina feminist border thought, to argue that place-in-being be recognized as one way of understanding the relationship between pluriversality of place and multiplicitous selfhood. Place-in-being is meant to describe the profound and unique relationships we can form with places, and how places can mediate certain affective dimensions of experience, such as intersubjectivity, temporality, vitality, ontological possibility, and the preservation of habit.
Open Access
Species Trouble: From Settled Species Discourse to Ethical Species Pluralism
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Sinclair, Rebekah; Koopman, Colin
In this dissertation, I develop and defend the importance of species pluralism (the recognition and use of multiple species definitions) for both environmental and humanist ethics. I begin from the concern that, since the concepts of the human and animal have been rightly challenged for their essentializing and exclusionary social function, the concept of species has come to serve as a supposedly more accurate, value-neutral, and ethical ground on which to negotiate moral claims. Yet I show that in the absence of critical evaluation, and with very little attention to the complexity and uncertainty of species boundaries as articulated in the sciences, much environmental philosophy and ethics instead deploy a myopic understanding of species that is both scientifically reductive and morally problematic. I draw insights from philosophy of biology, as well as Native American and Latinx philosophies to identify and challenge what I call the settled species discourse, or the widespread tendency to understand species as self-evident, mutually exclusive groups with singular, clear boundaries and stable natures. By understanding species this way, the concept of Homo sapiens in ethics plays a similarly and dangerously normative role to that of the human, while essentialized understandings of species can undermine the very ethical goals for which they are deployed. I thus turn from monism to multiplicity to develop a heuristic I call ethical species pluralism. Specifically, I argue that accounts of epistemic and ontological pluralism from within anti-colonial traditions can productively supplement the important framework of species pluralism in philosophy of biology, even as the former also provide tools for making such pluralism actionable in society, ethics, and policy. Building on this heuristic, I conclude by showing that approaching ethical species pluralism historically (generating counter-histories that do not take species as givens) can helpfully track and challenge the way make specific species or species groups are made legible and disposable in science and society. By placing Indigenous and Latinx perspectives together with philosophy of biology and environmental science, this dissertation hopes to help bridge the gap between these literatures while also producing more scientifically and morally responsible interspecies ethical frameworks.
Open Access
Decolonizing Silences: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Deep Silences with Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Ferrari, Martina; Stawarska, Beata
Motivating this dissertation is a concern for how Western philosophical, cultural, and political practices tend to privilege speech and voice as emancipatory tools and reduce silence to silencing. To locate power in silence and not exclusively in speech and voice, the dissertation grapples with the normative implications of coloniality vis-à-vis the phenomenon of silence at both the theoretical and sensible levels; it investigates how modern/colonial assumptions affect Western understandings of the phenomenon of silence and eventuate modalities of existence that preclude hearing the polyvocality of silences. To press Western culture beyond its negative affinities with “silence,” I develop and defend the concept of “deep silence.” Unlike “silencing,” which is understood as the opposite of speech and signification and, as such, as a matter of an already available utterance being smothered or unspoken, “deep silence” indicates a transformative power that generates meanings that have not yet been voiced and that, importantly, breaks with colonial norms and expectations. Deep silences, I argue, can be a powerful decolonizing tool.The main interlocutors of the dissertation are Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For these authors, silence is not the opposite of speech, or a matter of an already available utterance being smothered or intentionally withheld. Rather, it plays a central role in giving human beings sensible access to the world. Both thinkers, moreover, appeal to the aesthetic to express the otherwise-elusive senses of silence. Working closely with Anzaldúa’s decolonial mythopoetics and Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic and ontological writings, I propose that the modality whereby one bears witness to experiences of marginalization matters to decolonizing endeavors. Mobilizing, rather than eliding, deep silences in one’s account decenters key assumption of Western thinking, opening onto modalities of healing often overlooked by Western legalism and Transitional Justice initiatives; it makes “visible” colonial historias without capitulating to specularization, i.e., rendering experiences of coloniality specular to and readily available for dissection and inspection by the colonizing gaze. My project thus not only offers a critique of discursive approaches to emancipation; it also provides a philosophically rich contribution to current debates about decolonizing methodologies and sense-making.
Open Access
The Hybris of Plants: Reinterpreting Philosophy through Vegetal Life
(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23) Kerr, Joshua; Vallega-Neu, Daniela
This dissertation reexamines the place of plants in the history of Western philosophy, drawing on the diverse philosophical approaches of Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Hegel, and Nietzsche, among others. I suggest that a close reading of these philosophers reveals an aspect of vegetal existence that calls for a fundamental reconceptualization of life as a manner of being: in its ambivalent encounters with philosophy, the vegetative shows itself in terms of what I call hybris. By “hybris” I mean the activity by which the plant relates a proliferative, overflowing growth with a characteristic proportionality by which the plant composes a determinate manner of existence. In Part One, I trace the emergence of “plant hybris” in Goethe and Hegel’s scientific writings and Nietzsche’s philosophy of life. In Part Two, I expand and develop this concept by returning to Plato and Aristotle’s biological works.
Open Access
Synoptic Fusion and Dialectical Dissociation: The Entwinement of Linguistic and Experiential Pragmatisms à la Wilfrid Sellars
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Naeb, Cheyenne; Pratt, Scott
This work will attempt to examine the relationship between experiential and linguistic pragmatism through the lens of the twentieth-century Analytic philosopher, Wilfrid Sellars. I maintain that Sellars meta-linguistic nominalism and theory of both conceptual and non-conceptual representation, the latter being known as “picturing”, can stitch together the most vital components from both sides of the schism. I shall compare the thought of Sellars to that of two representatives corresponding to the two forms of pragmatism listed above, those representatives being John Dewey and Robert Brandom. Using Sellars’s famous critique of “the given” as a starting point, I assess whether either thinker falls prey to said critique. From thereon I examine both representatives’ relation to Sellars and where the differences and similarities lie. I conclude with a Hegelian interpretation of Sellars’s theory of representation as a preliminary sketch of a future “naturalized pragmatism.”
Open Access
Universal History as Global Critique: From German Critical Theory to the Anti-Colonial Tradition
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Portella , Elizabeth; Zambrana, Rocío
This dissertation argues for a critical reconstruction of the concept of universal history. In doing so, it draws on theoretical resources offered by a materialist philosophy of history, as it is expressed in both German critical theory (of the 19th and 20th centuries) and Afro-Caribbean, anti-colonial thought (of the 20th century). Proceeding through an examination of classical conceptual oppositions in the history of philosophy such as historical specificity versus transhistoricity, nature versus history, and universality versus particularly, the project also surveys tensions and limitations of the historical assumptions of the existing literature in social and political thought. The dissertation explores the possibility of global critique for the present which emphasizes a multi-traditional and multi-regional approach to historically situated, critical social theory. It is argued that between the resources of the Western Marxist tradition (including Hegel, Marx, as well as the Frankfurt and Budapest Schools of critical theory) and anti-colonial thought (esp. systemic, materialist critiques of colonialism and imperialism from the Afro-Caribbean), the concept of universal history can be critically reconstructed to ground critiques of an antagonistic and unequal global society.