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.
Newton, Margaret(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 ...
Sinclair, Rebekah(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 ...
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 ...
Ferrari, Martina(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 ...
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 ...
Portella , Elizabeth(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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Akbar Akhgari, Paria(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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Billingsley, Amy(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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...