Category: 2017

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2017 Abstracts Stage 2

The Art of Online Dating: A Heideggerian Account of Online Dating as Poiesis

Online dating is a major social phenomenon which is radically changing the ways in which we interact with each other.
How does online dating affect the ability to reveal one’s self authentically, and to develop authentic relationships with others?
Might there be a way of understanding online dating as a route to truth, and thus as being an artistic phenomenon?

Main Concepts:

Enframing:
Online dating and modern technology

Being-towards-death:
Authenticity and the internet

Being-with:
Authenticity and romantic relationships

Poiesis:
Online dating, art, and truth

Categories
2017 Abstracts Stage 3

The Reality Of ‘Generation Snowflake’ In Relation To The Contemporary Situation Facing Free Speech

Generation Snowflake and The Contemporary Situation

Defined in the Collins English Dictionary – ” the generation of people who became adults in the 2010’s, viewed as being less resilient and more prone to taking offence than previous generation”

How has ‘Generation Snowflake’ come to be?

Foucault’s analysis of the kind of power at work today in Generation Snowflake is the interference and dominance of medicine, a discreet mode of power facilitating the set-up of this transactional reality.

Does Free Speech Exist Today in ‘Generation Snowflake’?

Mill’s Harm Principle – to safeguard liberty and free speech, ” the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will, is to prevent harm to others”.

Categories
2017 Abstracts Stage 2

Are the ethics instilled within the current film ratings still attainable within our modern society? A historical insight into the progression of the rating system and the ethics applied within it

The aim of my project is to provide a historical exploration in the change of films rating system from its first code, The Hays Code, to the current classification of film ratings. In order to do this I will need to understand the ethics implemented in its change and then comment as to whether I believe it to be viable in modern society. Specifically looking at the notion of the Spectacle as a critique.

Key thinkers involved within my project will include John Stuart Mill, Jeremey Bentham. I will specifically take from their works the key idea of the Harm Principle and Bentham’s Hedonic Calculus. An interpretive analysis of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle will help answer whether the ethics within film ratings is sustainable in modern society.

Categories
2017 Abstracts Stage 2

The Death Penalty – An Inhumane and Degrading Treatment?

Territory: Punishment
Object: Death Penalty

Why this topic?: In my view, the death penalty is an appalling punishment. The whole concept of killing a human being in an inhumane manner to restore ‘justice’ in society because of their wrongdoing, is in my view, utterly absurd. The use of violence is a degrading way of punishing criminals. How can a governmental system that is supposed to promote moral justice kill its own citizens?

Aims of Project:
1) To address the moral question that is associated with the death penalty as a form of legal punishment as the main concern for analysis.
2) Examine rivalry accounts from both a philosophical and political point of view that are either for or against the punishment, and the consequences it would have on the morality of society.
3) Learn about the history of the death penalty in the two Westernised countries: Britain and America, (including its effectiveness)

Categories
2017 Abstracts Stage 2

Is there a fundamental destructive drive for people to self-starve themselves? Comparing historical asceticism and that of the modern day phenomenon ‘anorexia nervosa’ to help answer this question

Anorexia Nervosa, a harmful disease effecting an increasing number of people, relates to a distorted body image and an irrational fear of gaining weight. Whereby self-starvation and severe self-control of food is practiced in return for domination over one’s body and self in a world where they feel they have lost control.

My objective in this essay is to explore the possibility of there being a destructive internal drive that leads people to refrain from food. In order to create a comprehensive argument I will be considering anorexia nervosa in the territory of medieval asceticism and the cultures that surround them to help identify whether it is culturally triggered or it is in fact inherent in one’s self.

First I will consider Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right to outline his ideology on social identity being equally important as the will when it comes to moral behaviour.

Having scrutinised his philosophy I will be looking at both Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation to emphasis the impact of the ‘will to power ‘ that has over oneself.

Ultimately, I aim to prove that although culture plays a part in people’s behaviour, fundamentally there is an inner destructive drive, which is the same throughout the ages that drives the sufferers of anorexia nervosa to self-starvation.

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2017 Abstracts Stage 3

Neoliberal Distress: The Effect of Contemporary Capitalism on the Mental State of Young People

My project aims:
Outlining neoliberal hegemony, why it has become so universally pervasive.
To uncover the manner in which neoliberalism increases levels of distress for young people through statistical evidence.
To look at the systemic shortcomings in treating mental illness and how this leads young people into self-medication and escapism.
To look at potential solutions to countering neoliberalism, highlighting precisely why the left has failed in doing so.
Concluding by revealing neoliberalism as pseudo-universal.

Categories
2017 Abstracts Stage 2

No-Platforming and UK Campus Censorship: The Liberal Dream. Progression or Regression?

Project Aims:

My project tends towards an understanding of No-Platforming and UK campus censorship (the object of investigation) within the context of Liberalism. In attempting to explain this relatively recent, and so-called Liberal, political phenomenon, I explore the way in which contemporary Liberalism functions as a political modality; and weather in fact it can be seen as Liberal at all. I Align the Liberal dream, as conceived, to Thomas Hobbes’ explication of a polity predicated on negative liberty (a term popularised by Isiah Berlin, and very much applicable to Hobbes). Hobbes’ thought serves as yardstick by which to measure the hermeneutic development of Liberalism. Leviathan is a primary text I refer to throughout the project. Berlin’s Two Conceptions of Liberty is also a primary source of information; providing the framework by which the debate between Classic Liberalism and Contemporary Liberalism takes shape. Classical Liberalism is affiliated with Hobbes’ emphasis on freedom from interference, and thus, in Berlin’s terms; negative Liberty. The question surrounding contemporary Liberalism, as symptomatized by No-Platforming and UK campus censorship, is whether it is a negative libertarian ideology or weather it has regressed into a political system that makes freedom possible only within the restrictions of prevailing beliefs, even if those beliefs, somewhat confusingly, concern freedom of oppressed groups. If the latter, contemporary Liberalism bears resemblance to pre-Liberal political ideologies with positive liberty at their core; and has thus regressed.

Categories
2017 Abstracts Stage 2

Artificial Intelligence: What Does It Mean to have consciousness?

I aim to talk about the possibility of consciousness arising within artificial intelligence with reference to two thinkers who have not yet been incorporated into the debate: Immanuel Kant and Andres Bretton. In doing so I hope to uncover new ways of talking about consciousness in less anthropomorphic ways.

Kant: Kant’s transcendental idealism can be used to propose a theory of the minimum requirements for consciousness to arise in artificially intelligent machines. In addition to this, the distinction he outlines between ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’ can be seen as analogous to the Turing Test and the Chinese Room thought experiment and therefore can be used to show the qualitative difference between our human experience of consciousness and any potential consciousness that might arise within artificial intelligence.

Bretton: Bretton’s Surrealist thought is used as a juxtaposition to Kant formulaic and systematic approach. The surrealist practices of automatism raise the question of a difference between human consciousness and potential consciousness within artificial intelligence in that it raises the issues of intentionality and the subconscious, something which artificial intelligence.