This dissertation explores critiques of mass education alongside the rise of the research university as they appear in the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. More specifically, it traces the development of a theory of (un)learning that inserts distance into the pedagogical relation to produce a discretized educational...
This dissertation is an in-depth exploration of Clarke Distributions (for 10), an original musical composition based on the use of text to establish interrelational listening and performance patterns between performers, in place of any fixed musical material. Inspired by research into improvisation, cognition, aesthetics, and linguistics, these patterns manifest as...
This dissertation reinterprets Michel Foucault’s theory of sovereignty to offer an explanation and critique of repressive state violence. Commentators typically locate Foucault’s contribution to political thought in concepts of power that are irreducible to sovereignty or the state. In contrast, I draw on Foucault’s early genealogies of power to argue...
Contemporary decolonial criticism and critical phenomenological thought may be characterized as proceeding from a disenchantment with the philosophical aspiration towards universality. The overarching argument put forward in this dissertation is that there is, to the contrary, an intimate and even necessary connection between the decolonization of philosophy and the affirmation...
Aristotle says that true assertions in practical philosophy are true “for the most part.” I argue an assertion is true “for the most part” if it refers to the hypothetical realization of a substance’s essential capacities under some set of impediments. The removal of impediments to the full realization of...
My dissertation defends a hermeneutic conception of ideology and its critique that situates both in the world-disclosing function of language.I argue that we must conceive of ideologies as world-disclosing embodied interpretive schemas insofar as they guide our cognitive, affective, and conative access to reality by providing the background knowledge, meanings,...
This dissertation develops a causal theory of the relevant alternatives in a situation and applies this theory to the semantics and epistemology of conditionals, the theory of knowledge, and the epistemology of stereotyping. The first chapter presents the theory of causal models and causal alternatives. The second chapter applies this...
Does race matter globally, beyond national and regional contexts? If yes, then how exactly? I argue that race matters globally and develop an account for understanding that significance. I call the account “global racial capitalism.” In chapter 1, I offer background to motivate and defend the thesis that race matters...
This dissertation addresses inter alia the problem of certain intertextual discontinuities across Thomas Hobbes’s oeuvre regarding the issue of ecclesiology. I find that these disparities did not result from a change in Hobbes’s private opinions, but from the regicide of 1649 as an event that liberated Hobbes to unveil his...
“Entertaining Strangers” reveals how theories and practices of hospitality shaped and were shaped by the early modern print and theater industries. Whereas earlier studies of hospitality and literature have focused on aristocratic patronage, in this dissertation I reveal the vital importance of commercial hospitality as a framework for ethical and...