In the contemporary world, which values accountability and justice, can we hold to esteem the art of individuals who have lived morally reprehensible lives?
Artists and their art are one, inseparable entity. The intentional act of creating art is to put an illusory part of oneself into the world, as in line with the philosophy of Nietzsche.
The feral Dionysian characteristic of artists has long been used to excuse morally reprehensible behaviour. However, due to the changing status of artists from remote, struggling characters into celebrities who are part of an elite world, artists are being held to a much higher standard of morals.
Author: Glen
This project aims to explore the nature of offensive humour, using readings of W.E.B Du Bois’ theory of ‘double consciousness’ (a duel perspective originally felt by black Americans) as well as the three laughter theories (as told by Hobbes, Kant and Freud) as a framework for presenting the main arguments regarding taboo topics within the comedic realm, these being 1.) in support of censorship within humour, with the exception of oppositional satire from the oppressed, and 2.) in support of a freedom within laughter and comedy, as per their supposed nature. I aim to ultimately offer a new perspective regarding this argument, expanding on ideas seen within my chosen concepts.
OBJECT: Offensive Humour and laughter as a response, and how this may link to censorship/freedom of speech
TERRITORY: Ethics. (Analysing whether offensive humour is ‘right’ to use)
CONCEPTS: Interpretations of DuBoisian ‘Double Consciousness’, laughter theories (as stated by Hobbes, Kant, Freud)
The continued belief in the reality of ghosts despite their unscientific nature can be reasoned down to a person’s social class.
Using Foucault’s philosophy we can use types knowledges to see the power structures within society and how they control us. Those who are unhappy within society such as the working classes are in position to critique society and thus see these structures.
By believing in the paranormal, one is making a choice to accept a knowledge outside of the ones deemed acceptable by society and thus unmasking the structure of what is and is not acceptable.
Both Buddhism and Nietzsche’s philosophy point in the direction of nothingness. Nietzsche studied Buddhism at a young age due to his training as a classical philologist and it most likely accompanied him throughout his life as one of the cornerstones to his thought alongside his great educator Schopenhauer. Buddhism as a philosophy lacks breadth and depth, unlike Nietzsche who is a far-reaching philosopher writing on many topics in a variety of ways. It is an articulation of the application of emptiness and becoming onto all things in the universe – subtle in its poetic method of reducing many things’ Being to empty becoming. Buddhism is direct yet allusive in its brevity, a feat somewhat lacking in Nietzsche’s numerous aphorisms: there is so much character and enthusiasm in Nietzsche’s many articulations of nothingness and his many affirmations of life, forcing the discussion at hand to demand that portions be ignored, to allow other parts to make sense. So that Nietzsche may compliment Buddhism and Buddhism may compliment Nietzsche, the discussion will dissect Nietzsche’s most pure nihilisms from his array of articulations and applications of nihilism, in order to be able to compare their likeness to one another. The discussion will likewise only have eyes for Madhyamaka interpretations of the Buddha’s doctrine through Nagarjuna. Importantly, Nietzsche and the Buddha will be discussed within the milieu of their contextual origin, which will poke at the purpose of their philosophy: the Buddha’s extinction through nirvana demanded by his Indian peers (post-Brahmanical annihilation), and Nietzsche’s edified affirmations of life, attempting to provide the facilities for all to see ‘it’ for what ‘it’ is, in Europe upon God’s death. This discourse is a deliberately polemical approach to nihilism for the sake of being able to discuss Nietzsche’s selected philosophy and Buddhism mutually, improving ones ability to see where the two agree and disagree at the cost of excessive hyperbole.
Over the course of my project I will be answering one of the most relevant and controversial questions of the 21st century. This question is a personal one as I hope to follow a career in the direction of environmental business and sustainability.
The aim is if ethics in our lives have positive or negative consequences. I will be discussing the environmental work of modern ethical philosophers such as Peter Singer and Thom Brooks whose work starts to lay out if there is a way of stopping environmental change if ethics are used in our lives.
I will be using Singer’s utilitarian approach and Brook’s political philosophy to truly discover the ways in which we can or if we can prevent worsening the environmental change problem.
I have chosen these particular philosophers as they single out the facts and problems with environmental change in both an ethical and moral perspective. They equally have two individual philosophies and ethical solutions which gives the project two very different sides to contrast.
Singer’s utilitarian and consequentialist theories and workings plays a valuable part in linking Bentham and Mill’s older utilitarian works. Brook’s political and activist philosophy gives the statistical analysis of the damage of environmental change and this aids in his conclusion, that basing ethics in our lives will slow the damage that environmental change has on the planet.
I have chosen an interpretive approach to my methodology with the analysis of both Singer’s ‘Practical Ethics’ and Brook’s ‘Climate Change Ethics for an Endangered World’. These books have a number of comparisons with other philosophers and their theories which gives many different angles to display support for my view that ethics in our lives has a positive effect on environmental change.
These ethical solutions and theories I have applied to what I believe are the core ethical dilemmas which environmental change either negatively affects or that contribute to these negative effects. The areas I have chosen are the effects on the animal species and the plant species, and also the affects that businesses and governments have on contributing to environmental change in the past and present.
Richard Ramirez, otherwise known as the infamous “Night Stalker”, once stated in an interview that ‘we have all got the power to kill in our hands, but most of us are afraid to use it. Those who aren’t, control life itself’. The first person to conceptualise evil was St Augustine, who believed in the metaphysical concept that evil was a necessary part of the world, for one cannot have good without evil. They both must coexist to create a balanced structure, thus describing evil within humans. The existence of evil is something that most humans view as destruction and nothingness, hence why they dislike the thought that it could reside within them. However, without evil in the world, there would be no conception of reality. If anything, good can only be praised as something which is not evil. Good is not a concept that guarantees happiness or fulfilment, and it is a concept that guarantees a lack of destruction.
This project will focus on the different contemporary theories of evil action regarding the concept of evil to deduce whether Richard Ramirez was justified in his claims about humanity and murder. BBC News claims that ‘over three decades in the late 20th century, there was a rise in serial homicides in North America’, explicitly suggesting that ‘a rise in serial killings [started] in the late 1960s, peaking in the 80s – when there were at least 200 such murderers operating in the United States alone’. This lead several theorists to attempt to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for evil. Some, such as Marcus G. Singer (2002), have focussed on evil as a root of personhood, whilst others, such as Luke Russell (2014), consider evil to be action-based.
The first part of this project will focus on the concept of evil and harmful wrongdoing. This chapter assumes that actions can be evil in themselves or that actions can be considered as ‘wrong’ in themselves. This chapter will then lead to evil and harm where it will be argued that evil must ‘cause or allow significant harm to at least one victim’. This part of the project will be crucial in deciphering whether evil is necessary within a person to cause another individual harm otherwise understood as quasi-deontological ethics. Then will continue into the concept of evil and motivation, which will delve into desire as a motive within a human mind, whether evil is a desire or something innate within us, otherwise known as consequentialist ethics. Evil could belong either to souls or to acts; if the former, there need be no consequences, if the latter, then evil is necessarily consequential. The next part of this chapter will focus on evil and its effect; this chapter focuses on the emotions humans must provide to commit murder and whether emotions must be involved to create evil. This chapter will conclude that evil resides within the soul rather than within the consequences of human action.
Then most importantly, the project will end with a chapter on evil and responsibility, which will focus on how evil resides in the soul using the classic argument of nature versus nurture. This will argue on behalf of ignorance, when people do not understand that what they are doing is wrong or when humans do something wrong by mistake and without intention. Then it will argue on behalf of psychopathy, where humans struggle to feel remorse for their actions which therefore makes it harder for them to act in a way which is socially acceptable. It will argue on behalf of upbringing, as evil could be distilled in childhood and traumatic experiences from a young age. This will be the crucial part of the essay in tying together the conclusion as to whether it has been ‘universally accepted that to perform an evil action an agent must be morally responsible for what she does’ unless that is of a natural event; however, there are other responsibilities for evil actions.
In 1967, French literary theorist and cultural critic Roland Barthes asserted The Death of the Author. Representing a call for a diminished heed in reviewing the backdrop of the author when interpreting a text, he states the reader as the only place where such meaning within a text can accumulate. It is through the Internet meme, “groups of items sharing common characteristics of content and form” (Williams, 2020, 4), we see this call met. Addressing Foucault’s “author-function” argument, we see the meme detach from the author’s stipulation — in its being propagated on the Internet, participation in the creation of work no longer holds regard to an author. Instead, we see memes created, propagated, spread, remixed, edited, actions integral to the digital experience, allowing the meme to standalone as a piece of work in its own utterance, it is not simply an original piece but woven in it lies countless threads of culture. In detailing Pepe, the Frog meme, we find memes represent a collective cultural experience: different groups rally over the Internet to depict meaning to a piece of work, presenting differing composition of cultures, none of which original. Thus, in the Internet age, the birth of the reader is in full stride, presenting the author as truly dead, in the context of the collective ownership of memes.
Is rewilding compatible with veganism? Rewilding is a conservation effort which can contribute to the efforts of solving climate change. Due to the use of animals in rewilding, it raises questions for ethical vegans and so my territory is animal ethics. Through axiological critique, I intend to consider veganism from a deontological, consequentialist and virtue ethicist point of view and determine which is the best approach for practical matters, using rewilding as my object.
Although all forms of art have changed massively in the 21st century under the influence of digital technology, it is the forms of art that contained the aura in the 20th century that have changed the most as the aura that was once there, is no longer.
From its roots, phenomenology has tended towards an anthropocentric view of the world. This much is true in as far as we think of the phenomenological subject as a solely human entitlement which cannot be transplanted onto other modes of being such as that of the animal or vegetal realms.
Plants in themselves have been reduced, in the past, to objects for the human subject both in our experience of them directly (Husserl, for example, talks of trees in Ideas I, only referring to them as objects in their own right), and in their material advantages to us as commodities and resources.
Goethe made a step towards understanding the world of plants in and of themselves in his philosophical application of botanical orientated scientific, observational study. In his Metamorphosis of Plants, he explains how the elemental life force, striving or ‘conatus’ of plants is the basis for vegetal ontology and is akin to a sort of rationality in plants.
Michael Marder recognizes how plants present a specific challenge to western philosophy, especially phenomenology, and, in his book, Plant Thinking, problematizes the reductionary relation between the human world and that of vegetal being.
Human and plant interactions in the world are ontologically estranged from one another which necessarily calls us into an ethical state of being with regards to Nature as a unifying concept. The ecopsychological application of the Buddhist world view of Ahimsa and dependent origination allows a different reading of ontological alterity within Nature to that of Marder.
In this study we shall look at the temporal character of vegetal ontology as a route for acceptance of plant life as a conceptual authority in and of itself. By informing a critique of Marder’s revolutionary ethical stance towards vegetal being with a meditative contemplation of the world around us, based in Zen Buddhism; I hope to show how human’s experience of the world can benefit from understanding plant’s interaction with the world. I shall also consider how this change in perspective to our relationship with plants and their being-in-the-world could have a positive outcome in terms of conservation and environmental ethics.
This project looks at the question, ‘Is the age of social media marketing creating a warped sense of reality for Generation Z?’. This project explores and applies Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality as well as his theory of sign value, to the modern world of social media. As well as looking at areas such as fast fashion marketing and the effect social media can have on both mental health and our perception of reality.
The concept of death is one that philosophers have looked into since the ancient Greeks. Similarly to other topics, such as God, the soul and the universe, death and the afterlife is one that we will never fully understand. Both religious and non-religious ideas have formed relating to what different groups and thinkers believe happen after death, and this also intrudes on discussions relating to who we really are- whether we are only our body, only our mind, or a mixture of both. Certainly in the 21st Century, not only do we have the many writings of previous thinker’s opinions on death and the afterlife, but with medical advancements, we also have the experiences of some who have died and been resuscitated- many of whom speak about the overwhelming feeling of peace, welcomeness, support and even recall images of their past, calming settings and a bright light. However, there are previous philosophers, for instance Epicurus, who we will see later, doesn’t believe that death is something that we experience, thus we cannot ever truly know what happens after we die. Freud builds on this with his idea, asserting that humanity cannot imagine not existing as a thinking thing, therefore will fantasise attending their own funeral, which could also explain the experiences of those who have passed on and been resuscitated. Essentially, there is a suggestion that their beliefs about death could have an impact on what they believe they experience in the afterlife.
In this essay, I will discuss non-religious and religious views about the afterlife, as well as arguments for the possibility of reincarnation, from a range of different philosophical thinkers. I will explore this deeper through employing secondary sources that critically analyse these arguments and review how valid these arguments may be.
There are two main sides of the debate surrounding the issue of trans-gender athletes competing in sport – The first considers that everyone is entitled to participate in sport. The second deems it unfair and unsafe to allow trans-athletes to compete.
I offer to resolve this debate by proposing two methods that would change how competition is distributed. Moving away from the current system that sees competition based on sex, I will use Judith Butler to see if competition could be based on self-identification and John Rawls to see if competition could be based on what I will term as ‘micro-biology’.
The dramatic increase of cases of eating disorders over the past century means that it is now necessary to explore possible reasons for this rise in instances. In this dissertation, I will discuss how complicit capitalism is in eating disorders in women, as it seems that the increase in cases has coincided with the increasing grip capitalism has on the individual. First, using the work of Karl Marx and Jean Baudrillard I will explore the way that the individual within a capitalist society is made to see their body as an object which must be saleable in order to be useful. Due to the social prestige of a thin body, we see its owner as having more value than the owner of a fat body. Second, I will explore how the impacts of capitalist society on a woman can lead to her developing an eating disorder. Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of the socialisation of the woman shows how a woman is forced to see herself as an object belonging to the male subject. She is left feeling that her body is the only object she has any mastery over and makes it thinner in order to show this mastery. Julia Kristeva’s abjection will be used to show how the woman is forced into ‘choosing’ her status of an object within a capitalist society and that consequently she feels she must be the perfect object of desire. Lastly, I use the work of Massimo Recalcati to explore the direct connections between eating disorders and the capitalist world. Within capitalism we are encouraged to fear the Other, this makes the individual desire to cut them off – which they do through food. Recalcati also suggests that capitalist society makes us see the lack which causes our desire as a void which must be filled, and people with eating disorders do so through food – that being the presence of food or the absence of it. I will explore each of these sections separately before concluding with a synthesis of all of them.
This Project weighs up the positives and negatives of transwomen participating in elite level sport. The essay will be structured logically to allow for an in-depth argument. Firstly, empirically evidence will give an overview with an analysis of scientific research and public opinion. Following with philosophical input to give a moral and feminist stance on the matter. Overall leading to an overarching conclusion, that is, transgender women should be able to participate in elite level rugby.
Is the way Technology is advancing really “rational-and-desirable”? (A Critique)
A project by Emily Saladin-Crosse. 3rd year, Philosophical studies. Newcastle university, 2021.
[Item Image]
[key words: introjection, consumption of mediated, de-sublimated product and information; deciphering true and false needs; nothing radically new, increasingly; mediated learning…]
“Dear Guests,
As of 2021, we ask for your help for a critical approach to modern-day technology. To bring you up to date… The new “phenomenological playground” is the internet. Via the phone/ screens we consume products: are “fed” information, images, videos, short and long pieces of information all the time, on the news, social media, etc. Every single thing is at arm’s length (literally), just a *click* away: information, product, print, photo, … everything beautiful and ugly, available and accessible. Art, replicated, multiplied, “free”. Same with porn, and fighting. Surveillance is invasive and “normalised”. For instance, online, we give in quite voluntarily to different forms of surveillance, because it looks rational and desirable and it looks like we have choice. In fact, we are recognised as workers and consumers by Tech. The image shown is the one I utilise to demonstrate/ illustrate parts of the multi-layered problem of deciphering true and false needs which poses perhaps more and more of a problem than before because of technological tendencies towards infinity.
‘Everything is functioning’- says Heidegger, but also: ‘All our relationships have become merely technical ones.’ (Der Spiegel Interview, published after his death, 1976). Today, the values of the Enlightenment bombarded with items according to technological interests instead of our own. This is no longer “rational” to Marcuse in his critique of the Enlightenment ‘One-Dimensional Man’ (1964).
It is valuable to look into ideas such Tech reproducing 1-Dimensional thought in individuals and society as a consequence of “introjection” from the outside (a psychoanalytic notion to be examined). Technology and mediated learning would cause a problem for 18th century Rousseau, but the modern-day Rousseau-inspired educational theorists: we hold on to the idea of an analytic over synthetic approach to education. Whether there are true or false needs at all, is also a question to address.
The writing is in the form of a dialogue, online. This is how the forum proceeds:
ACT 0: Positions.
ACT I: The Paradox of Technology.
ACT II: Deciphering True and False Needs.
ACT III: More critique.
An application of Nietzschean and Bataillean philosophy to the music of Lana del Rey and The Stooges, in order to investigate whether music has the capacity to be transgressive. Specific use of Nietzsche’s concepts of the Apolline and Dionysiac with Bataille’s philosophy of transgression which includes erotism and expenditure.
The aim of this project is to look at consumerism, specifically consumer behaviour during the coronavirus pandemic and how it has evolved. The project will also explore how big tech companies such as Microsoft and Google are planning on using this for their own profit and power gain, whilst finally looking at some of the social and critical philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to highlight how this might be problematic and the potential implications it holds for society as a whole.
An investigation into the relationship between internet surveillance and panopticism, and how this impacts the identities of internet users.
Case Study – The Golden Shield Project: An in-depth look into China’s strict surveillance system and how it’s panoptic nature impacts Chinese citizens.
Key Theorists
Michel Foucault: Foucault provides a theory of surveillance that explains panopticism and demonstrates how constant surveillance, such as that seen on the internet, can be used as a tool for political power and oppression.
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
Zygmunt Bauman: Bauman explains why identity has become such a large issue in late modernity and why an identity is difficult to cultivate in the digital age, relating to internet surveillance and censorship online.
Identity (2004)
looking at the question, ‘Has the covid-19 pandemic enhanced poverty in England or has it simply exposed the poverty that already existed in our society?’ with reference to Mbembe’s Necro politcs, The State of Exception, and Nixon’s idea of Slow Violence.