Ph.D. - Philosophy

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10125/2133

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 10 of 105
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Thinking Like Dao: Environmental Virtue Ethics in Daoism
    (2024) Peng, Chih-Wei; Perkins, Franklin; Philosophy
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Worlds of Wang Guowei: A Philosophical Case Study of Coloniality
    (2024) Dufresne, Michael; Perkins, Franklin; Philosophy
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Living Death: Exhuming the Politics of Death and Remembrance in Arendt
    (2023) Byrnes, Elijah Wilder; Ishida, Masato; Philosophy
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Concept of Ekstasis in the Modern Japanese Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji
    (2023) Hoffman, Benjamin k.; Odin, Steve; Philosophy
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Epistemic Value Of Aestheticized Emotions: Wonder, Pathos And Comedy In Aesthetic Experience
    (University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Widdison, Lisa Michelle; Dalmiya, Vrinda; Philosophy
    This dissertation sheds light on the virtue conducive role of aestheticized emotions for a theory of knowledge. It brings classical theories of emotion and Kantian reflective aesthetic judgment, on the one hand, and the Sanskrit aesthetic theory of rasa, on the other, into dialogue with contemporary analytic epistemology. In order to account for a ‘reflective-judgment’ in the aesthetic experience of emotion, our vocabulary must be expanded to include impersonal, and subjectively universal / communicable emotions, and we must theorize these “distanced emotions” realistically in terms of aesthetic judgments, rather than logical, moral, and private judgments. Reflectively contemplating, and recognizing rasa-s, refines an epistemic agent into a conscientious, truth-oriented, and more egoless questioner of the world. One of the most expansive text traditions in this philosophy of aestheticized emotions is the Sanskrit aesthetics of rasa, whose authors date from 200BCE to 1000CE. Connoisseur “rasikas” theorize at least eight possible aesthetically relishable emotion-tastes. This dissertation hybridizes Kant’s theory of reflective judgment, and rasa theory to form an ‘emotion-centric account’ of “reflective judgment.” Several points of contact between our two aesthetic theories demonstrate that the affectively reflective epistemic agent is poised to inquire well, but not for the sake of some further end. Mutual harmony between the faculties of ‘imagination and understanding’ leads to communicable judgments of apt tastes. By analyzing three instances of “aestheticized emotions,” this dissertation shows how the cognitive faculties of ‘imagination and understanding’ are critically engaged with intellectual virtues in rasa. The rasa experience is arguably a normative, yet transpersonal and aesthetically moving moment. Specific intellectual virtues of “aestheticized” wonder, pathos and comic sentiments emerge that are theoretically contrasted with the ordinary emotions of “wonder,” “compassion,” and “derisive humor.” Rasas are characteristically linked to traits--lingering, insight, and humbling critique--that guide the process of inquiry, where epistemic value is not confined to propositional knowledge. Virtuosity extends into acquiring an intellectual character conducive to: ‘wisdom,’ ‘insight,’ and ‘self-critique,’ which is crucially important for epistemology.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Strange Indifference: The Metaphysics and Politics of Boredom
    (University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2021) Underwood, Brandon Pierce; Perkins, Franklin; Philosophy
    This monograph examines the genealogy of our modern conception of boredom, and attempts to critique its role in the modern educational institution. We begin with examining acedia and the moral connotations boredom inherited from the concept. We then turn to melancholia and explore the ways in which experiences of boredom began to be medicalized through a detailed taxonomy of causes. Next, we consider more recent ancestors of boredom - langweilig and ennui. In the case of the former, we discover the preoccupation with mechanical time and its role in our modern experiences of boredom. We also find a more secularized version of the moral disapproval first sighted in acedia. In the case of eunni, we see that modern boredom inherits a second sense, one of moral approbation, in the form of the dandy. Finally, we turn to Heidegger’s treatment of boredom to examine how both sides of this moralizing coin are synthesized into a single equivocal space at the heart of our modern conception of boredom.After completing this genealogy in the first two chapters, we return to Kantian language in order to develop our own positive definition of boredom, one that is rooted in the experiences of the will in the face of impotency. We then explore the ways that Foucault’s language of disciplinary technologies can help us characterize the deployment of the concept of boredom in the context of modern educational institutions, including the ways in which this deployment reveals racial and gender inequities within the institutions. In the fourth chapter, we consider three alternative pedagogical styles that can help undermine or alleviate the conditions that make possible experiences of boredom in the hope of resolving these pernicious, inequitable deployments of the concept.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Nishida Kitarō and Evolution: The Experiential Ecology of Emergent Form
    (University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2020) Izor, Matthew Allan; Ishida, Masato; Philosophy
    This work is a case-study in comparative philosophy of biology targeting the theory of life, experience, and evolution presented in the work of the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, whose writing offers a fascinating juncture between the epistemological views of the Anglo-European traditions and the epistemology that derives from Asian philosophical sources. In providing a naturalized and biologically aligned interpretation of Nishida’s thought, we begin to see an expression of an evolutionary framework that includes experience and agency as causally influential components. Nishida’s theory as I describe it provides logical parameters of an ecology of experience that includes and in fact prioritizes the concrete existence and influence of non-human experience and agency. This work makes a couple of key moves: I address the conceptual issues with a lop-sided focus on the notion of unity and the default human description of experience as being fundamental to Nishida’s early texts. In his earliest text An Inquiry into the Good, Nishida provides a balanced depiction of the notion of unity, along with the process of differentiation. I argue that, in fact, the tendency to focus one’s attention on the forces of contact and continuity in Nishida’s thought, actually has the potential to overshadow or even obscure the possibility of seeing the larger theory of life Nishida offers, and life through evolution is a primary expression of this differentiation for Nishida. I describe an oscillation of the polarities of unification through differentiation, and vice versa. By doing so, we can frame Nishida’s use of terms like “conscious activity” and “pure experience” in ways that are not exclusively human in Nishida’s description. Experience, as I argue in Nishida’s technical sense, describes determinative interaction in the most basic sense as a processual interlinking of interaction that occurs in very rudimentary living interactions, such as that of cells and plants. What Nishida refers to as “pure experience” is operative behind the epistemological gap, not in terms of pre-existing knowledge within a human organism, but in terms of ontologically preceding the epistemological gap and making it possible, replacing the fundamental assumption that experience occurs within a brain and instead placing experience into a complex historical ecology that includes organisms but is not exclusively internal to them. Through the language of experienced-based approaches to organismic activity such as Situated Darwinism and the concept of affordances, I help bring Nishida’s technical sense of experience into contact with contemporary biological thinking by uniquely characterizing Nishida’s theory of life as a place-based-event dynamic that torques the rudimentary experiential gradients into these emergent meaning-making affordance landscapes. Meaning-making processes occur in the living moments of distinguishing that occur in living organisms at all levels. This “double-rupture” theory of experiential evolution has implications for the evolutionary development of formal cause, something that is at the root if cognition and goal-oriented behavior. Nishida’s theory of formal causality is described as being the experiential place, basho, that is torqued open by the double rupture of living determinative interaction. I argue that this place is the medium where in experiential distinctions become influential as formative acts. And in this way reimagines the causal types that Aristotle lays out, but which have become dominated through certain metaphysical assumptions of a mechanistic view of naturalized causal types.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Case for the 'Fractal Self': The Scope of Moral Consideration as Influenced by Personal Identity
    (University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2020) Mandelstam, Joshua; Albertini, Tamara; Philosophy
    This dissertation begins with an exploration of why various occurrences of cruelty arise and then assess their moral importance. I shall argue that such cruel acts show the psychological basis for all immoral acts. That inquiry shall lead to an examination of the notion of Moral Consideration; the determination of who or what is considered by the agent when determining the consequences of one's actions and how far such consideration extends. From there, it will then look at the case of moral exemplars, and what can be learned from their views about themselves, including the notions of moral considerability that they use. This shall be followed by a detailed outline of the thoughts that allowed a particular exemplar – M. K. Gandhi – to act as he did. Given the implications Gandhi's views have, this dissertation will then turn to examine theories which do discount the individual self; specifically the works of Derek Parfit and Buddhist Ethics. Finally, I will argue that in order to take the most ethically effective actions, one must consider the different notions of self, not to determine the 'best choice' among these notions, but to take as many as possible into account simultaneously in order to determine the most ethical action.