The projects aim is to address the issue of fairness found in the negotiation process between the central government and Greater Manchester local governments. This issue of fairness stemmed from the overcentralised nature of the national government structure. John Rawls’s theory of justice will be used to rethink a fair deliberative position.
The territory of this project is the North-South divide which has been created from the regional inequalities which co-exist in England. Overcentralisation has meant these inequalities are not being addressed and this has created a feeling of unfairness among the North.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the issues found in the territory. The chosen object for this project demonstrates this as it explores the negotiations between Greater Manchester local governments and central government over COVID-19 financial support. Greater Manchester had minimal influence in these negotiations and believed this to be an unfair deliberation process and outcome.
So this project will address the issue of fairness with John Rawls theory of justice. It will provide a way to rethink the deliberative position to ensure a fair negotiation process and fair social circumstances under which an agreement can be made.
Category: 2021
The aim of this project is to investigate the current counter terrorism dilemma concerning the targeted killing, using drone strikes, on British terrorists overseas. It will be explored through a Kantian perspective and criticised, ultimately arguing against Kant’s theories. The primary case study used throughout the project is on the 2015 Reyaard Khan killing, ordered by PM at the time, David Cameron. There are four subsections within the dilemma to be explored: firstly, whether it is morally sound to kill at all, then assuming for the purpose of the essay that it is, whether it is ok to do so without a fair trial. The project will also investigate whether the British Government should be killing British citizens overseas when the death penalty is illegal in the UK, and if they are not, should they be passing on intelligence to the US for the Americans to send the drones instead?
Project aims:
• To raise awareness of the dangers facing this and future generations, such as the mental health crisis and the existential threat to society.
• To offer real world practical solutions, such as legal/governmental legislation to moderate social media and by limiting our own social media use today.
• To create a challenge for myself, by applying 20th century philosophy to a modern-day concept.
Object/territory:
• Social media: The big six include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok.
• Smartphone generation or Generation Z is anyone born between 1995-2012, this is the first generation to grow up with social media.
Sources used:
• Consciousness, Art and Technology: Karl Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ and Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The social media author is dead, and the cause is suicide.
• Kantian and Post-Kantian Philosophy: Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’. There is a drive attached to social media.
• ‘iGen’ book by Jean Twenge notices children are growing up slower and are facing a mental health crisis.
• ‘The Social Dilemma’ documents how social media is deigned to addict the user and then sell their data on. This can then end up in the wrong hands.
Credit will, in all likelihood affect everyone at some point in their lives. Whether it be a student loan, a mortgage, a credit card or buying a car ‘on finance’, the possibilities are vast.
I will look at the ideas of Hegel, who subscribes to the view that it is property is the embodiment of freedom, as well as that it is essential to the development of one’s personality, individuality and Asking whether credit can be seen to enhance one’s access to private property and therefore enhance their freedom.
I will then look at Lazzarato, who explores the debtor creditor relationship arguing that everyone, in the neoliberal age, has become debtors through a process of subjectivation by their creditors. But is this the case?
Is the threat or use of nuclear weapons in any circumstance ethical? Examining the ethical and moral implications surrounding nuclear weaponry.
My intentions within this project are to explore the ethical implications of both nuclear weapon use and nuclear deterrence policy. Through the course of this essay, I examine the scientific explanations of how and why the atomic bombs, both first generation and modern, are so powerful and can cause such devastation. Further on, I examine the philosophical concepts of the Just War doctrine, the concept of “dirty hands” and also the political theories of Machiavelli, applying all three to the concept of nuclear weapons. I also make reference to the success of anti-war movements in the non-proliferation movement, and the impact that various groups had in the dismantlement of vast quantities of nuclear weaponry, and the signing of several treaties.
I was compelled to write this project by a pattern of observations relating to the nature of language that began surfacing in the works of various philosophers, after having read the work of Wittgenstein. To cite some examples, from Arendt: ‘language, the medium of thought’ ; from Breton: ‘the speed of thought is no greater than that of speech, and does not necessarily defy capture in language’ . From my own experience, thought always seeks to transcend the limitations of language, and sensation can never find its perfect expression in speech. Yet it is true that the principal method by which we communicate these thoughts and sensations is language, and further for Arendt, the internal communication of these phenomena through a dialogue with ourselves is the very thing that makes us human. These observations highlight a tension inherent in all of us. The desire to express our humanity enters into direct conflict with the limitations of language. The aim of this essay will be to discuss this conflict. I hope to highlight some of the functions of language in thought, and to establish the possibility of achieving genuine self-expression through language in spite of its inherently communitarian nature. This the nature of the topics discussed prohibits me from offering some definitive conclusion; the essay is intended primarily as an exploration of the paradoxical relationship between the necessity of language, and our desire to escape its limitations.
This project is about the topic of sports washing, in particular, sports washing in the area of Football. It aims to provide an answer to whether the practice of it may be justifiable or not. The project shall argue against it being justified using Kantian ethics vs utilitarianism argument whereas the essay shall side with Kant. The philosophers against Kant are Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. some keywords to describe this are Utilitarianism, Sports washing, Kantian Ethics, Human Rights, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Football.
The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 has affected thousands of lives in England and South Korea. The management of the virus has been difficult, in terms of creating regulations that the common people would be willing to follow.
The responses in both countries, however, were significantly different. It can be considered that due to the contrasting cultures and identities, the responses from the people and the management from the governments were influenced by such background frameworks that are the foundations of the priorities.
This suggests that in an individualistic or idiocentric country, the government will prioritise people’s liberty and the economy, thus placing more importance on individual lives rather than the collective, alluding to less consideration of those extremely vulnerable. In comparison to a collectivist or allocentric country, the government will prioritise everyone’s safety, and the people will respond with discipline, thoughtfulness and accepting of regulations, that could be deemed invasive, for the sake of defeating the virus and lowering mortality rates. By considering the cultural shaping of identities, the value of liberty is displayed, in which individualistic countries lean towards individual freedom than the collective safety.
This project explored the philosophies of Charles Taylor, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman.
Other thoughts include the discussion of the East Asian Tradition, Confucius Ethics, with the sociological research of Geert Hofstede. The political and philosophical view of Robert Nozick will be utilised to understand the value of liberty.
We are, every one of us, mortal beings. Throughout the course of our lives we will deal with that knowledge and its consequences. We will suffer bereavement and loss. It is a universal condition, unavoidable and inevitable. Our mortality is what makes us human. We surround ourselves with habits and rituals to deal with that fact, and have since history began.
The modern funeral industry tries to hide that fact from us – we label funerals ‘celebrations of life’, insist that our loved one ‘passed on’, use deadly chemicals to preserve a body against signs of… well, death! The entire process seems stacked against allowing us any idea of what dying entails.
In this project I will use Martin Heidegger’s concept of the being-towards-death and Havi Carel’s ideas about ‘bodily doubt’ to explore how the crematorium as we know it today, of hidden steel ovens and pretty urns, contributes to the sanitisation of our understanding of death and mortality to the extent that we lose understanding of it, and fear it. In fearing it, we avoid it, and in avoiding it, we lose part of what it means to be authentically human.
This project investigates whether it is possible to believe in the soul and spiritual concepts in the 21st century, despite the rise in scientific research which aims to render them into fictitious elaborations.
AIM: With this investigation I aim to prove how it is entirely justifiable for individuals to hold a belief in the soul in contemporary society. I will reveal how the soul crisis today is purely a turning point in which science and spirituality can combine, introducing rational spirituality and examples neurological evidence in favour of the soul’s existence.
This project has taken me on a journey through the history of the human soul. I have looked at the ancient radical dualist philosophy of Plato and continental thought of Descartes, whilst analysing contemporary philosopher Tim Freke and his belief in ‘Emergent Spirituality’.
Scientific data and experiments for and against the soul have also been used to argue my conclusion in support of the soul’s existence.
This project came from a desire to be able to justify my own belief in the human soul, in a society where I have faced ridicule and criticism for holding such a belief. I began to question whether I was simply holding on to a deep desire for my life to be worth something, when actually in reality, I am a monkey who wears clothes, aimlessly wondering on a rock spinning to oblivion.
With the current pandemic I have never been faced with so much time in my own head to think about the existential questions that young people tend to brush over. Do I have a purpose? What happens when I die? Being faced with so much death and tragedy each day on the news, it forced me to think about the future of my existence. It forced me to want to prove that there is a place for those who believe in the purpose of humanity and spiritual concepts like the soul in the 21st century, and that science has not entirely eradicated the magic and mystery from my existence.
In this essay i will be drawing a comparison between ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ by Martin Heidegger and the state of social media today. I will investigate a couple of examples and use them to assess whether or not social media is a threat.
Territory: Society
Object: Religious commitment/belief
Concepts: Liberalism, Pluralism, Tolerance
Today, society is more liberal than ever; everyone has an entitled opinion. Is subjectivity the inevitable result of the postmodern? This question will be answered with a focus on religious commitment, as we know it can lead to conflict. Religion has a different order of commitment than other statements; it is part of your identity. This work considers where the line should be drawn when it comes to clashing views, as we have to find ways to live harmoniously.
I consider the Charlie Hebdo shooting, what went wrong and how people reacted. John Rawls’ ‘Political Liberalism’ will follow, explaining that toleration is necessary for a stable society. Focussing on his overlapping consensus between reasonable individuals. However, it is not universal as not everyone will except putting liberalism at the centre. Gianni Vattimo’s ‘weak thought’ (il pensiero debole) wants a weaker metaphysical understanding. For him, to think correctly is to be tolerant from the beginning.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to know where the boundaries lie. Relativism still proves to be a problem with Vattimo’s argument. Both philosophers have strong ideas, yet neither approach provides a fault-proof solution to the issues that arise in this current pluralistic era.
Aims:
This project aims to explore the concept of genius, in relation to education, to make a distinction between an educated and an exception. It will look at education and determine its impact that it has on individuals. And it will, lastly, attempt to address the question of what it means to be a genius and the possibility of becoming one.
Object: The concept of genius
Territory: Education defined as institution
Concepts:
Nietzsche’s Noble and Slave Morality
Rousseau’s General Will and The Role of The Legislator
Kierkegaard’s Despair and The Self
Sources:
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals
Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death
For decades, the correlation between the continuing rise in mental health cases and late-stage capitalism has been theorised by philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists. However, the problem still remains, and we are yet to find an adequate solution.
Individuals continue to be exploited by pharmaceutical companies more and more each year, as the rates in mental illnesses increase and in turn, so does the income of pharmaceutical companies who provide anti-psychotics.
This is where the Eastern practice of mindfulness seems like a viable alternative. Can mindfulness bridge help individuals that are suffering with their mental health, by eliminating this problem of contributing the exploitation of capitalist pharmaceutical companies?
Sadism and masochism coupled together as sadomasochism is a compound term which denotes a pair of opposites, adopted by psychoanalysis. The development of sadism and masochism began from the literary contributions of Sade and Masoch, which later contributed to the psychoanalytical analysis of the relationship in perversion between opposites. This project focuses on psychoanalysis being useful in the developed understanding of sadomasochistic relations, specifically in terms of how, why they are formed and are able to function despite being structurally separate. As a result, psychoanalysis claims a necessary reliance on each other present in sadomasochist relations, despite being the opposite of each other. The common psychoanalytic reading of sadism and masochism will be used, as a challenge to sadism and masochism being defined without being sourced from a process of reversal. In addition, there is focus on role of fantasy and if whether sadism and masochism can exist as a pure example without elements of the other, with perversions always existing as a pair of opposites in a relation of an exchange of power. The objects of sadism and masochism are applied to the territory of psychoanalysis with psychoanalysis providing depth into these concepts as they are of a paradoxical nature. A historical methodology will be used to follow the progression of the understanding of sadism and masochism, as developed over time with psychoanalytical understanding as such provided by Freud, Deleuze and Lacan.
This is an analysis of the collapse in morality that was seen throughout Germany in the 1940s under Nazi rule. I have taken the perspective of looking at Nazi evil through the actions of Josef Mengele throughout his time at Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. Throughout my dissertation, I have explained exactly what it is that Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, is renowned for; essentially beginning with his passion for eugenics – the beginning of his Nazi career at least
The barbarity of his actions is something that is analysed throughout my dissertation using Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann to evaluate the gravity of Mengele’s attitude and by extension the actions of leading Nazi superiors; for though I have focused on some of Mengele’s actions more specifically, I mean the purpose of this to be ultimately reflective of all Nazi figures that held any part in the systematic persecution and murder of millions of European Jews in the 1940s.
My project aims to understand the role that the unconscious has in affecting human’s behaviour and whether, because of this role, it can mean that humans have complete free will.
Does the unconscious have an effect on us without us even being aware?
If you are controlled by something unbeknown to you, are you able to have complete free will?
My object is the unconscious. My territory is the unconscious in relation to the effect the unconscious has on behaviour. Linking this all to whether this means we can have complete free will or not.
This project with focus on concepts such as: unconscious, morality, repression, free will and behaviour.
Freud – The Unconscious, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud’s Models of the Mind: An Introduction.
Sartre – Existentialism and Humanism
This dissertation looks at he concept of ‘intersectionality:’ the territory of my project. The object of the project is a song by Marlena Shaw: an American jazz, blues and soul singer who began her career in the 1960s. The song is called Woman of the Ghetto and will be used for the purpose of this project as an interpretative work of art that provides a means of understanding intersectionality as a concept. Briefly, intersectionality refers to the way in which individuals belonging to multiple marginalised social groups experience an entirely unique form of discrimination. In other words, a poor black woman like the protagonist of Woman of the Ghetto would experience discrimination in a totally different way than a black man or a white woman or, to some extent, the middle class would. It is perhaps best understood as different layers of discrimination. The Woman of the Ghetto becomes the living embodiment of intersectionality as she sings and scats a first-hand account of the day to day struggles of a poor black woman in 1970s America.
I chose to pair my passion for soul music with an intersectional approach after studying feminist philosophy during the second year of my degree. An introduction to some of the key figures within contemporary feminist philosophy encouraged me to think about issues surrounding the categories of sex and gender differently. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was that the roles men and women have conventionally assumed (so men going out to work to provide for their family and women staying at home to bring up their children) are, with time, undergoing changes. This led me to really reconsider my own lived experience as a young woman. I now can recognise less obvious oppressive sexist values that are more often than not a product of structural oppression as opposed to independent acts of discrimination.
These changes in gender roles have prompted many contemporary feminist philosophers to evaluate assumptions around sex and gender issues. These have influenced my research for this project almost entirely. Simone de Beauvoir was one such influence and I will be using aspects of her work to, again, further my understanding of Woman of the Ghetto as a first-hand account of intersectional oppression. De Beauvoir, in her The Second Sex writes of how women are perceived as ‘Other’ by men and are therefore unable to assume their own subjectivity. This is the source of women’s oppression and in my project I intend to argue that intersectionality is essentially the combination of the othering of women combined with the othering of black people to create a unique double-binded discrimination. I think De Beauvoir’s account of the source of women’s oppression is entirely convincing. She successfully shows how the male monopoly on subjectivity is historically problematic, but also a fundamental flaw in the potential to liberate women. Denying women the subject position necessarily entails a denial of their responsibility for their own actions. It is easy to see how this then becomes problematic for existentialists, as when women are confined to certain gender roles and limited to live out sexist ideals an existentialist would believe that they are living in ‘bad faith’ and ignoring the fact that all human beings are immutably free. I will then provide a discussion on how an intersectional feminism is therefore so crucial for existentialists like de Beauvoir herself in liberating all women, and not just middle-class white ones.
Ultimately finding that there are indeed some limitations to her account of the historical oppression of women, the remaining part of the paper proposes a slight revision of de Beauvoir’s work that takes inspiration from black feminist philosophers including bell hooks and Audre Lorde in order to carve out a space for otherwise unheard black voices. This is necessary for a fully-inclusive feminism that caters for the Woman of the Ghetto and all other women in a similar position.
This project’s aim is to explore Norway’s Halden Prison and look at whether or not its ethos of rehabilitation is a success in being the core function of prisons. The three primary texts that I will be using are Michel Foucault’s (2020) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Thomas Hobbes’ Social Contract Theory, in his Leviathon. I begin by looking at the historical shift of punishment as retribution (punishment of the body) towards punishment as rehabilitation (the reforming of the soul) (Foucault, 2020, p.7). From here, I move onto the two chapters that consist of the bulk of the project, the first focusing on rehabilitation and discussing the tension between whether it benefits the society or the individual. In the second chapter, I look at Foucault and Davis, who are problematising the idea that people are made into becoming a criminal—their problem is that often, ‘criminals’ are not actually ‘criminals’ and often do not need to be rehabilitated or corrected.
Due to the recent surge of both social media and overall decline of mental health this project title was chosen, and it seeks to discover a correlation between the two. Social medias rapid growth will be showcased to show its embryonic state, showing its lack of reliability. Once the link is discovered studies supporting the direct link will be showcased as well as Simon Sinek’s motivational talks about raising a generation on dopamine devices, which subsequently forms addiction and destruction of relationships. The ability to maintain healthy relationships is a key aspect in sustaining a good mental health. The philosophical investigation will then be carried out to come to the bottom of the issue, to uncover the deeper problems of SM in relation to the human psyche. Baudrillard’s concept of a ‘hyperreality’ (real without origin of reality) and Borgmann’s ‘virtual fog’ (seeping into human connection) will be explored. Borgmann, Baudrillard and Sinek harmoniously highlight that real life and real humans are complicated enough without adding this hyperreal virtual fog that further scrambles our brains- amplified into a kind of tortuous labyrinth which produces feelings of loneliness and deteriorates our mental states the more we attempt to make sense of it and the further we travel this untrodden idle path. Sartre ties it all together at the end with his ‘existence proceeds essence’, his fight for the potential of locating an authentic self. This potentiality is, arguably, being cut off by this hyperreal virtual fog. Inauthentic human existence produces melancholy. Reclaiming this, is possible as long as the prevalent overuse of social media is recognised as something inherently negative and reduced. Essentially this philosophical investigation concludes that the prevalent overuse of social media negatively impacts overall mental health.