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Philosophy Theses and Dissertations
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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.
Recent Submissions
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(University of Oregon, 2020-12-08)Does Nietzsche’s inquiry into the question of truth take him beyond the sense of truth as correctness found in Platonism toward a more Greek understanding of truth that brings concealment into an unsettling prominence ...
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(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27)This project considers attempts by scholars from within as well as outside Muslim countries to analyze gender and sex equality with a new approach that brings Islam and feminism into one discourse, often called “Islamic ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)In this dissertation I develop a philosophical account of melancholy as a productive, creative, and politically significant affect. Despite the longstanding association of melancholy with the creativity and productivity ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)My dissertation develops and defends a concept of reparative critique that presses critical philosophy beyond its affinities with negative judgment. In the wake of Post-Kantian philosophy, critique has become associated ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)“The Mixed-Race W.E.B. Du Bois: Historical and Contemporary Insights” unites two conversations in African American philosophy and philosophy of race: a philosophical interest in the scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and an ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)I argue that dehumanization is a necessary condition of modern genocide, and that preventing dehumanization should be part of efforts to prevent genocide. Unlike other scholarship that addresses this issue, I hold that ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)I employ history to ground, to reveal, and to understand the logical, metaethical, and otherwise explicitly philosophical problems of the pro-life/pro-choice binary system in American abortion discourse, a binary I refer ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)Gilles Deleuze’s interdisciplinary reception privileges the term, “assemblage,” but this translation runs the risk of appearing as jargon, whereas the original agencement would appear to a French audience as a more ordinary ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-04-30)This dissertation examines humor as a situated practice of reappropriation and transformation undertaken by a subject within a social world. I bring together insights from humor studies, philosophy of humor, and feminist ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-04-30)This dissertation examines the limits of the figure of democracy as a critical category in contemporary political philosophy. I frame the analysis around a structural tension in the work of several authors who rely on ...
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(University of Oregon, 2019-01-11)My dissertation provides an epistemic evaluation of settler colonialism in terms of settlers’ disavowal of past and ongoing settler colonial violence. I seek to explain how settlers can fail to hear Indigenous testimonies ...
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(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06)This thesis offers a reconsideration of the contentious relationship between Michel Foucault and postcolonial thought through the decolonial turn, by interpreting critique as attitude. The discussion of continuity in ...
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(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06)Motivated by student survivors of sexual violence at the ‘University of Nike,’ this dissertation claims the denial of trauma is a central motor to the temporal operation of racialized patriarchy and its philonikian, or ...
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(University of Oregon, 2018-04-10)The central argument of this dissertation is that virtue ethics is overly individualistic. In response, I develop and defend a more relational, ecological account - what I call extended virtues. First, following Andy Clark, ...
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(University of Oregon, 2018-04-10)My dissertation explores the ecological implications of a process metaphysics, focusing in particular on subjectivity. Primarily using the work of Whitehead and Deleuze, I explore how taking a process metaphysics seriously ...
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(University of Oregon, 2017-05-01)This dissertation gives an account of Kant’s understanding of the human animal through examination of a range of published works and lecture transcripts from the 1770s through the 1790s, with particular attention paid to ...
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(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)The field of environmental ethics has been in discussion and debate the past 40 years over how to best expand the circle of moral consideration away from a privileged human perspective to encompass the rest of the non-human ...
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(University of Oregon, 2016-11-21)The concept of “national security” has been an essential part of the political lexicon of the United States since the aftermath of World War II. Although it could be said that security in one way or another has always been ...
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(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)In my dissertation, I argue that the neoliberalization of higher education results in the university becoming less and less a place of wonder, self-cultivation and thinking and instead more and more a place to specialize, ...
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(University of Oregon, 2016-02-23)My dissertation explores the role of narrative in the cultivation of empathy for ethical attitudes and behaviors. I begin by exploring an uncommon view of human nature, concluding that we are not autonomously individualistic ...