This essay examines the concept of madness and discusses whether madness should have a place in our metaphysical framework. It begins by exploring Nietzsche’s presentation of madness in his text The Gay Science, and concludes that madness ought to be included within philosophy. It then goes on to examine Foucault’s historical analysis of madness in his text, Madness and Civilisation, which demonstrates how the voice of madness has gradually been reduced to silence as the language of reason takes over. This essay concludes that the voice of madness ought to be included within philosophy for at times it is only the authoritative voice of madness that can lead us to new truths.
Category: Stage 2
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 shows the fundamental racism in the American judicial system that mirrors the attitudes of colonial times.
• Primarily using philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon and his book, The Wretched of the Earth, I show the link between colonial and judicial racism and how prejudice from the past is still alive today, and how this could have happened.
• The wrongful conviction of the ‘Central Park Five’ is my key case study as it reflects the broken system that colonialism upheld.
• I also address other matters of judicial racism in different countries as it is a worldwide problem, with reference to some other philosophical views and relations to Fanon.
• In exposing the issue, I address the changes, Movements, and positive progression that continues to eliminate racism from the world.
• However, I also highlight the remaining systemic and societal racism and how much more needs to be done to cure the sickness that it is.
• I found Fanon’s philosophy truly engaging, the more informed about the horrors and persecution of colonialism I became, the more my interest in its history grew as I still wonder how humanity can be so inhumane.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French existentialist philosopher and a leading figure in the second-wave feminism movement. Beauvoir’s seminal book The Second Sex (1949) is widely considered as the first major study of women’s oppression in contemporary western feminist theory. The aim of my project is to examine Beauvoir’s central ideas in The Second Sex and subsequently demonstrate the topicality of Beauvoir’s manifesto on the feminist movement today.
By using the feminist philosophy of Judith Butler and Susan Bordo, explain why so many women suffer from eating disorders. The project refers to the role of women in society and the aesthetic expectations that are placed upon them with the advancement of social media.
By using the feminist philosophy of Judith Butler and Susan Bordo, explain why so many women suffer from eating disorders. The project refers to the role of women in society and the aesthetic expectations that are placed upon them with the advancement of social media.
The project chose to focus on eating disorders as they are a phenomenon which can cause serious damage to the mental and physical health of an individual. Specifically, the project analysed the relationship that females have with food. Alongside this, the project considered the effects of social media. Certainly, social media is something which has increased over the past few years. With this in mind, my aim was to uncover the negative impact it can have on female body image.
The desire for control is the aetiological thread that links the asceticism of medieval women and the asceticism of the anorexic woman. The lives of medieval women are characterised by a lack of control of the self. They were defined by their role as ‘body’ where men were ‘spirit’ and therefore destined to become subservient wives valued on their bodily processes. Like the medieval ascetic, the anorexic seeks to conform to the slenderness ideal that originated in response powerful intuitions exerting power over women. To be slender meant to resist democratic forms of power such as consumerism and to control desire where the regulation of such felt out of one’s control. Through Nietzsche’s notions of The Ascetic Ideal, it is understood that asceticism forms out of human suffering and conflict and focuses on empowering existence through control. Control of the body by abstaining from food therefore becomes an active yet inward facing form of resistance over institutions that have dominated women’s lives.
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
For the past centuries, gender has increasingly become an important point of discussion. With changes to the law to allow women to vote, to changes in government documentation with the allowance of labelling of non-binary individuals, to the popularisation of those who do not follow typical gender identitys in media. There is even more important changes occuring within this generations lifetime that allow gender to become understood and a topic people are no longer afraid to investigate
Territory:
There are many theories behind gender and possible explanations for why people identify certain ways. From the first argument which began thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece by Aristotle, which was natural kinds, whereby all females or males share the same ‘essence’ which later became the biological determinist theory which explained that there are biological reactions that cause individuals to either identify as male or female.
This is compared to societal kinds which means that gender identity is formed and continued through society. Our relationship with friends, family and the outside world determines how we identify. This is the position taken by most post-modern philosophers such as Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, and Nancy Chodorow. Each have a different explanation of how gender is formed and each place emphasis on different aspects of the individual’s social life.
Drag is a tool for individuals to help them experiment with their gender and an aid for helping improve self-esteem. This was studied by Jessica Strübel-Scheiner who helps to show the impact of drag in individuals from the lgbtq+ community.
Objectives:
To gain a deeper understanding of how gender is viewed in modern day society, compared to that of historical explanations.
To understand how drag can not only be used as a tool to help people understand their gender but as a way of combatting the stigma behind gender as well as creating a new environment for gender to progress.
Bibliography
Aristotle. (1999). Politics. (B. Jowett, Trans.) Ontario: Batoche Books.
Bach, T. (2012). Gender Is a Natural Kind with a Historical Essence. Ethics, 2.
Barnes, J. (2001). Early Greek Philosophy. London: Penguin Group.
Butler, J. (2007). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge Classics.
Butler, J. (2011). Bodies that Matter. Oxford: Routledge Classics.
Entwistle, J. (2007). Addressing the Body. London: Routledge.
Ereshefsky, M., & Reydon, T. A. (2015). Scientific Kinds. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 969-986.
Mambrol, N. (2016, December 8). Nancy Chodorow and Feminist Psychoanalysis. Retrieved from Literary Theory and Criticism: https://literariness.org/2016/12/08/nancy-chodorow-and-feminist-psychoanalysis/
Manders, B., & Windsor-Shellard, B. (2020, September 1). Office for National Statistics. Retrieved from Suicides in England and Wales: 2019 Registrations: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2019registrations#suicides-in-2019-by-english-region-and-wales
Millett, K. (1971). Sexual Politics. London: Granada Publishing Ltd.
Moi, T. (2001). What is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Plato. (1952). Phaedrus. (R. Hackforth, Trans.) Cambridge: Cambridge university press.
Strübel-Scheiner, J. (2011). Gender Performativity and Self-Perception: Drag as Masquerade. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 12-19.
Progressively foregrounded precisely in its lack of coming to presence is the operation by which an individual’s human or non-human, inhuman, status is delineated. It is thus that the margin of delineation by which the propriety of a human being’s humanity is decided becomes questionable and prompts further reflection. Receiving its impetus from Martin Heidegger’s Letter on ‘Humanism’, the following essay shall take the ‘human’ as galvanized in the thought of Marcus Tullius Cicero as its object, foremost reflecting on the human is discursively constituted in the complementary texts De Republica and De Legibus. This essay thus contends that Cicero’s thought constitutes the exemplary object of the critique Heidegger’s letter poses, and as such provides an essential foil to Heidegger’s proposal as to how the notion of νόμος (nomos) should be uptaken in light of the truth of being.
Tarot reading has gained a notable amount of popularity in recent years, but this does not align with the increasingly rational, post-metaphysical society of the West. Perhaps this new age scientific rationalism has proven too harsh for humanity, and there are calls to return to a more spiritual path. The individualistic nature of Tarot reading is much more appealing than the previous demands of traditional religion that once dominated society. Tarot reading may also be used as a therapeutic tool that can reveal unconscious desires for the future that have been repressed by the psyche, and through an act of projection onto the Tarot cards, we can reveal these true desires that are usually hidden from the surface.
The concepts that I will use to explore this question are Mele’s self-deception, Freud’s psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, Semetsky’s therapeutic hypothesis and the rationality of logical positivists.
An ethical consideration for those implicated in the participation actions leading to mass casualty events. Referencing primarily the philosophy of; Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. The historical events and individuals involved feature predominantly in the 2nd World War.
War has very distinct and polarising effects on people and does not have to look far to gauge a common consensus on how negatively it can be viewed, because of its destructive, chaotic, and immoral nature. Very few people have been prepared to argue that war is morally desirable, so the question central to this investigation will query whether war can be seen viewed as something beyond purely immoral, and beyond the initial preconceptions, so that we might perhaps view it in a way that enlightens us, and is productive to us. The investigation is split into 4 sections.
– ‘War should obviously be morally wrong.’
Why do we think war is wrong? Are our assumptions based on dogmatic tendencies?
– ‘Is Killing wrong, and should it be wrong within warfare?’
Using Immanuel Kant’s universalising imperative, I will suggest it is wrong to kill, however, I will engage with an understanding of self- defence in war, arguing that scenarios such as war create a problem for these initial assumptions.
– ‘Why do we go to war?’
What reasons can we provide for going to war? Can we justify it?
I aim to introduce Hegel’s historicism, exploring the ‘purifying’ ontogenetic capacities of war (war might be required to achieve peace and stability in the first place), and Machiavelli’s pluralism, to provide a different interpretation that a leader who is governing and conducting warfare should not consider ethics at all.
– ‘The Nuclear Age: Do we need to reconsider the ethics of war?’
Informally referred to in my investigation as “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”, I will bring everything together with consideration to growing temporary warfare to revaluate our understanding of morality; technology and the advent of possible nuclear destruction change ethics?
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?
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
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.
The recent and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown a clear display of the attitudes and values some of society withhold in response to the restrictions and guidelines put in place to protect the larger community. While there is constant conflict between opinions on these restrictions, one thing that the debate almost always comes back to is the question of freedom and freewill, and whether enforced mandates are a violation of this or a commitment to the greater good regardless of sacrifice. Current events present this question; however, this discussion is not new and has been debated throughout history by many philosophers, but speakers Karl Popper and Fredrich Nietzsche present particularly appealing arguments that can be applied to both the conversation regarding the lack of freewill in this modern pandemic and in the past with reference to morality and religion. Furthermore, the debate of the validity of the proof behind the reasoning for the COVID-19 restrictions is constantly argued, often from two uncompromising parties, one that sides heavily with the scientifically backed restrictions and the other who completely disagrees with the evidence and its validity. The heavily discussed philosophical concepts of rationalism, empiricism and relativism can be applied to this argument to analyse each viewpoint and provide an insight on how philosophers like Popper and Nietzsche would approach the argument based on their philosophical beliefs and views of the above concepts. With this project being heavily based on the differing viewpoints of the community during the pandemic and linking this to different philosophical concepts based in several different fields: rationality, focusing on the subject’s personal beliefs; empiricism, focusing on scientific, verifiable truth; and relativism, focusing on the subjects moral and religious beliefs.
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.
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.
Concept: Memory
Philosophical Thinkers: Locke and Freud
Aims:
1. To highlight the malleability of memory
2. Argue the dangers of using memory as evidence within law- e.i. eye witness testimonies without empirical proof.
3. Analyse true case studies that indicate the ruining of people’s lives due to memory and the manipulation of it.
The human species faces three key threats that could lead to our extinction: virus threats, nuclear warfare and overpopulation. In order to secure the future of our species, there is a question as to whether we leave earth and colonise another planet. This essay examines that question with a central focus on Kant’s theory of duty and Kierkegaard’s idea that we must act on the strength of the absurd. It also uses value theory and Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” to show that we can permissibly leave earth’s nature behind us. The argument that will be proposed throughout this essay is that, as a species, we have a moral obligation to leave our planet.