Baruch de Spinoza was an important and influential philosopher, born into a Jewish community in Amsterdam. He was issued a herem however early on in his life, as the elders deemed his ideas to be heretical. This work looks at Spinoza’s philosophy not as a heresy, but instead as reminiscent of a more modern, secular Judaism.
Within this work, I will examine how several influential Jewish figures interacted with Spinoza’s thought. I aim to show that one can track the increasing secularisation of Judaism through time, through the change in reactions these figures had. These figures include the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and Polish/American author Isaac Bashevis Singer.
I will mainly employ both an interpretive and a historical methodology. In terms of interpretive methodology, I will be analysing the written work of Spinoza, as well as the Jewish figures of focus, and several Jewish religious texts. In terms of historical methodology, I will take into account the historical context behind each Jewish figure, and Spinoza himself.
Category: 2022
What is it to be a Self?
• My objective is to explore personal identity by using film and television as thought experiments. I want to further my own understanding of my ‘self’, as well as that of others around me.
• Body theory: Our personal identity persists because we have the same body from birth until death. Challenged by ‘Star Trek’ Transporter thought experiment.
• Soul theory: The soul houses our identity, supported by Plato and René Descartes. Challenged by films such as ‘Still Allice’, how does Alzheimer’s damage the soul?
• Memory theory/ psychological continuity: John Locke’s Memory Theory. We have memory links to different stages in our lives, and they are all connected. Films such as ‘Total Recall’ and ‘Blade Runner’ call into question the role false memories can have in shaping our personal identities.
Society and the Self
• Zygmunt Bauman: Timeline of personal identity. We are in Liquid Modern Times, technology dictates personal identity. Explored in films such as ‘The Social Network’ and ‘Her’.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: Flux, we are in a constant state of becoming, so there is no fixed self that persists through time. Christian values of the past should be rejected, instead we should practise Amor Fati.
• Fixed identity: Exists in the Pre-modern Era and in Social Frameworks, i.e. institutions such as the Christian Church. Patrick Bateman in ‘American Psycho’ undergoes an identity crisis in response to the fixities in his life.
• Fluid identity: The transition from Walter White to Heisenberg in Breaking Bad is fluid identity in action. Supported by Bauman and Nietzsche, as it can make for a more tolerant society. However, lacking a solid sense of self can be dangerous.
My aim of this project was to investigate the impacts that the platform OnlyFans has had on the sexual emancipation of women. I did this by providing an analysis of Pier Pablo Pasolini’s work on sexual emancipation and capitalism, thereby applying these concepts to the context of OnlyFans. I discussed the works of Rae Langton and Martha Nussbaum on objectification and pornography and applied these concepts to the concept of OnlyFans.
I discovered through my research and analysis of Pasolini and OnlyFans that OnlyFans can have a detrimental effect on women’s sexual emancipation in a capitalist society as it contributes to consumerism. The concept is that consumerism perpetuates the concept of ‘false tolerance’, introduced by Pasolini in his work Trilogy of Life Rejected. This is the idea that the lower classes and minorities are encouraged to be sexually emancipated, however, it is in fact all a commodity. This means that OnlyFans contributes to consumerism and therefore, does not actually emancipate women, but uses their bodies as a commodity.
In the context of objectification, Langton and Nussbaum provided an understanding that tradition pornography objectifies women and denies them of their autonomy. I concluded that because OnlyFans is done completely autonomously by the women who created the content, OnlyFans does not objectify women to the same severity as traditional pornography. Therefore, suggesting that OnlyFans is a healthier and safer alternative for women to traditional pornographic material.
The concept of the hero is one that has been debated and discussed sociologically, historically, and even psychologically but not so much philosophically. There is not one singular definition of a hero yet the concept can impart extraordinary knowledge of the wider world and how it has changed, as well as highlight the notable development of the concept of the self throughout the years. The interdependent relationship between the hero and the society can tell us a lot about human nature. Through looking at two antithetical heroes – an Ancient Tragic Hero and a Contemporary Superhero – and the differences between them I have investigated the idea of selfhood and how that has completely changed, alongside how society reflects this relationship. I have used Aristotle’s Poetics and MacIntyre’s After Virtue to analyse in what ways the concept of the hero can teach us these things. It seems as if the self has become something distinct, and that in contemporary society we become who we are through our actions and how we behave, in contrast to the ancients who act and behave in the way they do because of who they are. There are these crucial elements of fate and choice which highlight the complete change in the hero. Through this contemporary understanding, it seems as though it does not make sense to think of morality solely in terms of action and theory but rather in virtue and practice too. Humanity has developed to a point where we should be looking at morality in terms of character, actions, and society in a unified manner rather than just in the actions themselves.
In general, over the past decade, there has been an increase in documentaries about serial murderers to the point where websites are suggesting the top ten to watch. This intrigued me to the point where I wanted to investigate further; I wanted to look at the point time when their morality and ethical viewpoint changed from what would be considered to be an average person to their infamous persona of the killer and assess this investigation through a philosophical point of view. The typical serial murderer is seen to be an intelligent white man from a middle-class background. Still, I wanted to know if I could prove otherwise by looking at people from poorer backgrounds, those of different ethnicities and differing genders. This was achieved by utilising the arguments of Aristotle. How people become virtuous, Luther and Erasmus on the debate of free will to determine whether these people acted of their own volition, and finally, Freud and his concepts of Trauma, Repression and Dream to see whether these influence the people in question too, or if they are born evil. Ultimately, I conclude that all of the areas discussed combined may cause the serial murderer, but trauma and the lack of virtuous people in their lives contribute more than the others. Equally, this has opened more questions regarding these people’s level of responsibility.
The British monarchy has been apart of the political intuition for centuries. Despite being one of the few monarchies left, there is still a great amount of love for the monarch. However, it is unusual that the working class of Britain would support this ideology in comparison to a complete democracy.
Anti-natalism and value creation: should humans continue to procreate?
It is not worth being brought into existence if one can potentially experience
any form of suffering. The philosopher David Benatar argues that whilst life can
consist of pleasures it also always consists of some form of suffering (making
living harmful for people and the world). “while existence brings pains as well
as pleasures, non-existence is a lack of pains and pleasures. While pain is bad,
absence of pain and pleasure is not bad, so it is always worse to be than not to
be” (Brake and Millum, 2021). It means that even if life consists of 99%
pleasure and 1% suffering then it still would have been better to have never
been.
As controversial and counterintuitive it may seem to desire to stop humanity
from bringing more people into the world, it also does not violate the moral
law to live. Kant conveys strong beliefs surrounding the idea of suicide but
never conveys it in a way that would take future generations into
consideration. Implying that as long as the individual had not yet come into
existence then one does not go against basic moral rights. It is not our duty to
consider the life of potential future generations, but it is our duty to live our
lives once we have been born (Philosophynow.org, 2019).
The arguments put forward by anti-natalists challenges common beliefs in
relation to procreation and examines the roots of where various normative
views stem from and whether they are adequate justifications for procreation.
Benatar, D. (2013). Better never to have been : the harm of coming into existence. Oxford, England:
Clarendon Press
Philosophynow.org. (2019). Philosophy Now. [online] Available at:
https://philosophynow.org/issues/61/Kant_On_Suicide.
This project shall investigate the premises of social media to explore how perfection can be portrayed online, alongside the effect that it can have on individuals and society as a whole. Using the concepts the ego, the id and the superego, from the work of Freud, The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the notion of shame from Sartre, this project seeks to understand how these concepts can be used to understand why an idealised online persona is desired.
This project explores the object of the muse through the territory of feminist philosophy and the context of the Surrealist movement and its founder André Breton. I explore how the movement worked systematically to exclude women from the role of artist, allowing them only to be part of the movement only as muses, which are characterised by Breton as child-like and hysterical. I use the works of Catherine Malabou and Luce Irigaray to explore how this erasure can be looked at from a feminist philosophical point of view and later use the work of Simone de Beauvoir to suggest how women could possibly escape this erasure through transcendence. Leonora Carrington is used as emblematic of this escape in her autobiographical Surrealist novel The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below (1989) and I suggest that the only possible way for the female Surrealists to be seen as artists and not muses by the movement is by partaking in this journey Down Below and becoming new in this journey. Despite any progression in feminism since the Surrealist movement I argue that the place of women as muse remains largely unchanged and the systematic erasure and discrediting of women from art only continues as it had in the Surrealist movement.
Modern liberal democracies are often assumed to operate in accordance with an unobjectionable neutrality with respect to the various worldviews of their citizens. By examining the work of Locke and Rawls, I demonstrate that even the most sophisticated conceptions of society and secularity rely on value-judgements that are asserted by the state on behalf of its citizens. The aspirational target of value-neutrality held by the liberal democracy is thus shown to be unattainable.
We’ve had Athenian civilisation, we’ve had the Renaissance, and now our civilisation centres round the arse.
-Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot le Fou
Since World War II, capitalist society has experienced a proliferation of consumer goods and items so vast that, according to Jean Baudrillard, they have come to take on the nature of flora and fauna. Our streets are lined with shops and restaurants, while our houses are filled with various nonessential items. For some, almost every moment in waking existence is related to consumption. For others, consumption is a type of leisure, a break from a life spent in an office doing paperwork. But how did we end up in this endless cycle of consumption? Why is consumption a lifestyle for so many people? How could such a large societal change be enacted in such a short space of time?
Judging by how quickly capitalist society has accepted and embraced consumerism, it would seem as though humans have an endless capacity to consume, and that consumer capitalism frees us to pursue this natural end. However, I will argue in this essay that consumerism is an oppressive identity and force that makes us desire its oppression. I will do so by opening the discussion of a consumer identity through Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Pierrot le Fou. Following this opening, I will use Pier Paolo Pasolini’s critique of consumerism to show how consumerism acts as a force of social homogenisation, and also apply this critique to Pierrot le Fou. Then I will use the concept of the Young-Girl from Tiqqun’s book Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl to show how the consumerism as a form of social control has developed from the 1960s, and how it has created an identity that engenders more consumption, and therefore a degree of self-oppression. Finally, I will use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus to show how the social and the political directly produce subjects and how desire comes to desire consumption, even if this leads to its own oppression.
On September 16, 2022, 22 year old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran, Iran’s capital, following her arrest for wearing her veil incorrectly. She died as a result of the strict enforcement of the veil in The Islamic Republic of Iran, a law which has been in effect since 1983. In this dissertation I conduct a genealogy of the veil in order to understand its development as a moral phenomenon, following the genealogical methodology employed by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. I examine the relationship between modesty, hair and sexuality in order to determine why the veil is so highly valued in Iran. I adopt Nietzsche’s theory of perspectivism in order to overcome the Western misconception that the veil is necessarily oppressive, and instead argue that it is the Iranian veiling laws which are oppressive. I then analyse Edward Said’s Orientalism, focusing on the ways in which the West has represented the East according to Said, and the implications of Orientalism for Western perceptions of the veil. I suggest the adoption of a postcolonial feminist attitude in order to redefine the problem in Iran as a feminist problem, not a religious one.
The aim of this project is to investigate who ought to have the authority to decide on the accessibility and use of data such as messages over social media – the state or the companies? Having the right to this level of authority will bring enormous influence politically, socially, and economically in our current society which is why it is a relevant and significant debate amongst modern ethicists
Analysing the UK’s contemporary penal system using Marx and Foucault.
Since the late 20th century, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been an exciting yet daunting topic of discussion for many disciplines, and within the last ten years, we have seen exponential growth in algorithmic use. In the UK specifically, since 2015, police departments nationwide have begun testing and introducing algorithmic-led predictive policing which uses historical data to recognise trends to predict crimes. Academics across many disciplines have widely acknowledged the potential for these systems to reinforce existing social bias. However, one critical issue has remained largely unexamined by such academics: the ominous implications of predictive policing algorithms for the victims of sexual violence within a rape culture.
This project offers an alternative criticism through a feminist lens of predictive policing algorithms, and delves into the power dynamics exercised in such a society along with the structure of oppression that may come from it. This project further shows that to solve the issue of rape culture, reform of individual beliefs and systemic power structures is needed instead of focusing on predicting the outcomes. Using Foucault’s disciplinary power, Deleuze’s Societies of Control, and Iris Youngs phenomenological and political philosophy, this project concludes that understanding the lived experience of women is the most effective way to combat rape culture and sexually violent crimes, not predictive policing. The relationship between cultural structures and physical embodiment shows that it is only on the individual level that we can deconstruct structures of power that permeate a culture, not through institutions.
This project seeks to explore the film genre of horror, and within that, its representation of women. With a territory surroudning the representation of women in horror, the objects of this project consist of a selection of horror films, most notably slashers from the 1970’s and 80’s. These include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre I & II, Halloween, Aliens, and the non-slasher Videodrome. The overall aim of the projects was to discover how a genre so fixated on producing an atmosphere of fear from the physical mutilation and sexual assault of women could be anything but negative representation. However, through the researching and writing of the project, it was discovered that, through the exploitation of cultural taboos, the horror provides space for concepts of female agency, inverted male-female dynamic, and critiques of existing gendered issues of domestic violence and the sexual exploitation industry, to be explored in ways which other film genres do not allow. Moreover, horror has always existed as a medium for representation, specifically for women, compared to more commercially and critically successful films have not.
Through utilizing Freudian psychoanalysis, and screen theory, this project dives into the aforementioned films, as to derive how female characters within the films are represented, through their costuming, framing, and overall qualities. In addition, Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex allows an application of feminist philosophy to the project, providing depth to the politically/culturally systemic nature to the representation of women in the broader sense. Furthermore, her reference to the Hegelian Slave-Master dialectic assisted in the analysis of the discussed films.
Other texts used within the project include Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Coral J. Clover’s Men, Women and Chainsaws, and Erin Harrington’s ‘Gyneohorror: Women, Monstrosity & Horror Film’.
On the back of Britain’s anti-racism movement, arguably civil disobedience is becoming an ever more prominent feature in the protester’s arsenal for raising awareness regarding their social and political agendas. Naturally the project concerns itself with understanding and assessing whether civil disobedience is a necessary attribute in bringing about governance and increasing the potential for change. The project will focus upon the subsequent acts of civil disobedience associated with the Black Lives Matter movement (‘BLM’); the vandalism and the tearing down of the Edward Colston statue (Bristol) and the vandalism of the Sir Winston Churchill statue (Westminster). However, the significance of the project’s enquiry lies within questioning the treatment of these statues and thus the nuances of the discussion are embedded within the statues themselves. These will be analysed through conceptual exploration of property, representation, and jurisprudence.
Whilst recognising that there are some points of comparison between the statues and their treatment, much of the project will target their differences and aim to reach an understanding through wider analysis of civil disobedience itself. Arguably, culminating in an analysis of Colston’s role within the Bristol community versus the role of Churchill within the national community. Consequently, the project will recognise that it is not a simple task of addressing whether the man set in stone was ‘bad’ or ‘good,’ but much rather a more complex exploration of memorialisation and representation.
A Study into Human Nature: To What Extent Can you Change your Own Personality?
The aim of this project is to explore the unresolved issues within the prison system that do not necessarily get thought about every day. My project will discuss those issues such as race, women’s sexual assault, gangs and inhumanity within supermax institutions.
The key philosophers will include Michele Foucault, Angela Y.Davis and Lisa Guenther.
This paper attempts to show how the object of prayer is linked to knowledge, as knowledge from a theological standpoint finds its root in God, and prayer from an Islamic perspective is seen as a direct communion with God. I will look at this from a cosmological aspect, with regard to the idea of man being created in the image of God and the Adamic potential of man. I will also look at the different levels of knowledge and what knowledge is for both Qadi Abu Bakr Ibn’ Arabi and Abu Hamid Al Ghazali. Ghazali emphasizes the concept of the heart being a vessel of knowledge and uses light as a metaphor for knowledge, I will try to outline how to attain a state where knowledge is possible by means of the heart, as well as showing from a cosmological perspective that the function of humans is to be in constant remembrance of God, thus constant prayer, through the idea of the divine names of God.