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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.
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(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2022-05-10)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13)The principal aim of this dissertation is to seriously consider what accounts of fashion and dress can offer—have indeed already offered—to philosophy. In recounting these histories, I have two primary goals. The first is ...
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(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13)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 ...
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(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13)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 ...
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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 ...