Category: 2013

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 2

A Critique of the “Cult” of Willpower and Positive Thinking

Have the terms willpower and positive thinking become arbitrary labels which are used to explain success, failure or motivation when no other logical explanation presents itself?

Is Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace testament to this?

What do we mean when we describe acts of bravery, like those of soldiers at the Battle of the Somme, as extreme measures of willpower?

Smile or Die: has the self-help culture of the late 20th and early 21st century developed an attitude that positive thinking can overcome any problem, whether it be loosing weight, finding love, or beating cancer?

What light does Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power” shed on contemporary ideas of motivation and success?

Is humanity a struggle for dominance where the strongest willed individuals exploit the weak and the foreign through appropriation, injury, and overpowering?

If “life simply is the will to power” do we actually have any way of controlling, training or improving our will?

Does the answer to this question explain whether willpower and positive thinking have become arbitrary terms which have no tangible or practical meaning?

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 3

Embedded within Reality? A Philosophical Inquiry into Whether Photographic Practice Differs from Other Modes of Visual Representation in Terms of its Classification as Art

The discussion of this paper will be centred on the argument of whether photography can ever be considered as anything more than merely a mechanical replicate of the world. Photography is generally seen by many as an automatic unemotional means of ‘capturing a moment in time’. Art, on the other hand, is commonly seen as a hand-rendered expression of human imagination typically illustrated within a visual form.

The following questions will be asked;
 What effect has the mass production of photographic images had?
 How much does the intentionality of the artist matter?
 What is the impact of photo-manipulation on the notion of authorship?
 Can our perception of a believed photographic reality be merely an illusion?
 Is our modern consumerist world driven by the image?

We will begin with a brief outline of the ways in which photography of the past designed modes of replicating the painterly styles of the artworks of the time. We shall then discuss the notion of how photography became a product of mass production, whilst introducing the thoughts of Walter Benjamin and Heidegger who both see modern works of art, and photography, as unable to reach the previous standards of past great artworks for they have lost originality, ‘aura’. We shall consider the views of Scruton who fundamentally states a photograph is unable to be the product of aesthetic judgement for it is bound by a casual relation to the world and is an automatic technical invention which requires no thought processes on behalf of the creator to effectively formulate it. Our discussion will finally lead us to the views of Susan Sontag and Jean Baudrillard who believe that under the present age of our consumer media driven tradition, our reality is reinstated by the photographic image, for photographic seeing fundamentally alienates reality.

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 2

Cinema Violence. Quentin Tarantino in the World of Aesthetics and the Problem of Beauty in Evil

Territory: Cinema Violence

Object: Quentin Tarantino

Concepts: Audience emotion, aesthetic formalism, the problem of beauty in evil.

Philosophers: Noël Carroll, Mary Devereux, Joseph Kupfer, Quentin Tarantino

Objectives
– To better understand the arguments put forward by Quentin Tarantino for his use of violence.
– To further explore these ideas in the context of philosophy of audience and aesthetics.

– How has violent cinema developed?
– What is Tarantino’s role in the history of cinema violence?
– What is Tarantino’s relationship with his audience?
– What is Tarantino’s aesthetic philosophy?
– Where does Tarantino fit in with the problem of finding beauty in evil?

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 3

Mental Illness as a Social Construct

Key Concepts
Stigma of mental illness in society – The effects this has on the modern day sufferers & the effect of the overall illness within society itself.
Mental Illness as a social construct – How it is seen to be created by social influences and what this means for the illness.
Public Conceptions of Mental Illness from historical and modern media influences.
Is there even such a thing as mental illness?
What is an illness of the mind?

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 3

President Kagame What makes a legitimate Leader?

Hobbes
State of Nature/ Rwandan genocide

Rousseau
One’s right to obey a power does not legitimise power

State of Peace with Sovereign Kagame

Kagame’s possible move to Democracy to legitimise his power

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 2

Are We Naturally Egoistic or Altruistic?

THOMAS HOBBES – ‘Leviathan’

Man is selfish in the state of nature; we achieve peace through a sovereign which we obey for selfpreservation.

BERNARD MANDEVILLE – ‘The Fable of the Bees’

Altruistic behaviour is a myth and the motivation for everything we do is egoistic. Our ultimate goal is always to increase our own welfare and we help others only to the extent that helping them can benefit ourselves.

AYN RAND – ‘The Virtue of Selfishness’

Rand believes that since selfishness is serious, rational and concerned with one’s own wellbeing, then it is therefore a requirement to achieve ultimate moral value. Rand therefore states that this is the reason that selfishness is in fact a virtue.

DAVID HUME – ‘Treatise and second Enquiry’.

Hume puts forward that not only do we experience in ourselves a feeling for humanity but we also observe it in others. He argues that this sympathy and benevolence disproves the selfish hypothesis and is “contrary both to common feeling and to our most unprejudiced notions”.

JEREMY BENTHAM AND JOHN STUART MILL –

The theory of utilitarianism somewhat contrasts with both egoism and altruism.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU –

Rousseau argues that human nature on the whole is good. He argues that it is the influence of society that corrupts and changes the ‘natural man’ into an egoistic being.

Egoism
Calculated altruism, underlying self-interest?
Doing good for the sake of reward?
Selfishness in disguise?
Survival of the fittest?

Altruism
Natural interest in the good of others?
Doing good for the sake of good?
Developed and evolved throughout humanity?
Must we be taught altruism due to natural selfishness?

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 2

The Church of Scientology

One of the fastest growing new religious movements in history, The Church of Scientology claim they possess the ultimate answer to existence, inviting the individual to sign a billion year contract to aid L Ron Hubbard and his missionaries on the road to total freedom. Scientology is a highly controversial movement, labelled by many as a dangerous and abusive religious cult. What is it about Scientology that attracts the masses? Psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung posited a clinical viewpoint on religious belief and practice.

Philosophers in their own right, their psychological theories of religious belief can be applied to religious cults such as Scientology. Freud judged religious faith to be a neurotic need, with belief bringing some comfort to our search for a father figure. In contrast Jung posited religious belief has underlying therapeutic value, giving the agent a chance to achieve emotional closure and human ‘wholeness.’ Nietzsche and Dawkins argue such benefits come at the cost of delusion. Cults appear to bring contentment – at a cost.

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 3

“I’m Gonna Make Him an Offer He Can’t Refuse … ” A discussion concerning the definition of political legitimacy and its features, comparing the Sicilian Mafia with Sicily’s central governments of the 1860’s and 1920’s

Can the notion of political legitimacy be effectively applied to the Sicilian Mafia? What defines a legitimate authority? Can the Mafia be seen as legitimate if the state is not? These concerns will be discussed within the parameters of two central points in Sicilian history; the Unification of Italy during the 1860’s and the Italian Fascist regime of the 1920’s, allowing for a comparison between the Sicilian Mafia organisation and Sicily’s governments.

Philosophy
MARX; is the state merely an illusion, disguising our real interests? I must have self-mastery in order to be free and rational; is the Mafia therefore legitimate?
RAWLS; There must be a publicly recognised universal and fair distribution of justice in a well-ordered, liberal society; does the Sicilian state achieve this?
The thought of HOBBES and ROUSSEAU regarding the definitions of ‘authority’ and ‘political legitimacy’ will be used as framework to the discussion.

Sources
Historical interpretations and genealogies; including Pantaleone’s The Mafia and Politics , Dickie’s Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia , and Duggan’s Fascism and the Mafia . Coppola’s The Godfather films were used for inspiration.

Categories
2013 Abstracts Stage 2

“Between Knowing and Being”

Part One; What is knowing and its limits Part Two; What are the limits of knowing the individual self. Part Three; The Social ‘I’ Throughout this project I aim to understand the subjective ‘self.’ I am ultimately investigating this area because in the UK, the Mental Health Foundation has claimed that “1 in 4 people will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year.” In my opinion this figure is drastic, and therefore I believe that an understanding of the human mind is crucial in overcoming the problems we currently face in our society.  1. I commenced with an investigation into the development of knowledge throughout Western history, beginning with Kant and Newton. This will enable me to analyse how successfully we can attain an understanding of the self. I discover that the scientific method itself is proven to be limited and non-universal. The examples I looked at as a potential cause of this were Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, and also the theories of Existentialist Philosophers. As demonstrated by Watts (1957), arguably any new Western theories turn out to be mere restatements of old positions. 2. I then looked into Western conceptions of the self from statements of neuroscience and theories proposed by phenomenologists and philosophers of mind. Naturally Western Science excludes any investigation of the self from its domain by requiring an identifiable object to which we can apply mathematics to. 3. The revelation of our limits in knowledge will consequently lead me to investigate an alternate conception of the human self and the ability to attain knowledge. This originates in the Eastern world, in both Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This focuses on an alternate type of knowledge such as the unconscious knowledge we have of moving our hands. Crucially the conscious thinking process is not the centre of the mind’s activity. As we directly experience reality, it is in the realm of the non-verbal. 4. This lead me to understand the nature of language, which I discovered is extremely limited in providing an explanation of the world. Language by nature is linear because it allows us to make rapid grasps of our thoughts, which we can think of only one at a time, however this causes a depiction of the world as static and fragmented. 5. Heidegger argues that we can have a liberation from these social conventions, by appealing to the notion of an original spontaneous being who exists priori to being influenced by social codes. However, I have argued that this notion that anything can remain constant is unlikely. 6. Furthermore, I believe that it is impossible to try to understand an isolated individual self in the Western sense, because through language the social aspect is fundamental to our nature. Mark Williams, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, John Teasdale and Jon Kabat-Zinn (2007) have promoted this form of Eastern understanding as being beneficial to those with mental health problems, and I believe this significantly demonstrates that Western scientific knowledge is certainly not a superior discipline.