Has the insurgence of Social Networking Services propelled us towards Jean Baudrillard’s concept of social hyperreality? Well, Jean Baudrillard would argue yes, social
networking services are bringing us closer to a state of ‘pure simulacrum’, where no real understanding of the world can be divined. Albert Borgmann would argue yes, but the issue is more complicated than this. Social Networking Services are a product of our desire in a postmodern Western landscape to integrate technological designs into our everyday life. We can complain, but we caused it! But Hubert Dreyfus would argue not necessarily but engaging on the internet is dangerous in the same way Soren Kierkegaard thought engaging with the press was once. We lose track of our sense of identity and conform too much! No matter who’s opinion you look at more, one thing is for sure, that social networking services hide more than they reveal.
Category: Stage 3
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.
From its roots, phenomenology has tended towards an anthropocentric view of the world. This much is true in as far as we think of the phenomenological subject as a solely human entitlement which cannot be transplanted onto other modes of being such as that of the animal or vegetal realms.
Plants in themselves have been reduced, in the past, to objects for the human subject both in our experience of them directly (Husserl, for example, talks of trees in Ideas I, only referring to them as objects in their own right), and in their material advantages to us as commodities and resources.
Goethe made a step towards understanding the world of plants in and of themselves in his philosophical application of botanical orientated scientific, observational study. In his Metamorphosis of Plants, he explains how the elemental life force, striving or ‘conatus’ of plants is the basis for vegetal ontology and is akin to a sort of rationality in plants.
Michael Marder recognizes how plants present a specific challenge to western philosophy, especially phenomenology, and, in his book, Plant Thinking, problematizes the reductionary relation between the human world and that of vegetal being.
Human and plant interactions in the world are ontologically estranged from one another which necessarily calls us into an ethical state of being with regards to Nature as a unifying concept. The ecopsychological application of the Buddhist world view of Ahimsa and dependent origination allows a different reading of ontological alterity within Nature to that of Marder.
In this study we shall look at the temporal character of vegetal ontology as a route for acceptance of plant life as a conceptual authority in and of itself. By informing a critique of Marder’s revolutionary ethical stance towards vegetal being with a meditative contemplation of the world around us, based in Zen Buddhism; I hope to show how human’s experience of the world can benefit from understanding plant’s interaction with the world. I shall also consider how this change in perspective to our relationship with plants and their being-in-the-world could have a positive outcome in terms of conservation and environmental ethics.
For this project I chose to explore that way that societies attitudes towards gender have shifted in the past 100 years. Through analysis of the work of Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, I created an argument based upon the notion that we are defined above all else by our gender.
In order to bring my argument into the modern day, I looked into the Vogue December 2020 cover and article featuring Harry Styles and the subsequent backlash that it received.
Furthermore, I explored the territory of masculinity and femininity, referencing things such as the Mars and Venus symbols for gender and their meanings.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that gender whilst prevalent in modern society, has taken us as far as it can.
Is the way Technology is advancing really “rational-and-desirable”? (A Critique)
A project by Emily Saladin-Crosse. 3rd year, Philosophical studies. Newcastle university, 2021.
[Item Image]
[key words: introjection, consumption of mediated, de-sublimated product and information; deciphering true and false needs; nothing radically new, increasingly; mediated learning…]
“Dear Guests,
As of 2021, we ask for your help for a critical approach to modern-day technology. To bring you up to date… The new “phenomenological playground” is the internet. Via the phone/ screens we consume products: are “fed” information, images, videos, short and long pieces of information all the time, on the news, social media, etc. Every single thing is at arm’s length (literally), just a *click* away: information, product, print, photo, … everything beautiful and ugly, available and accessible. Art, replicated, multiplied, “free”. Same with porn, and fighting. Surveillance is invasive and “normalised”. For instance, online, we give in quite voluntarily to different forms of surveillance, because it looks rational and desirable and it looks like we have choice. In fact, we are recognised as workers and consumers by Tech. The image shown is the one I utilise to demonstrate/ illustrate parts of the multi-layered problem of deciphering true and false needs which poses perhaps more and more of a problem than before because of technological tendencies towards infinity.
‘Everything is functioning’- says Heidegger, but also: ‘All our relationships have become merely technical ones.’ (Der Spiegel Interview, published after his death, 1976). Today, the values of the Enlightenment bombarded with items according to technological interests instead of our own. This is no longer “rational” to Marcuse in his critique of the Enlightenment ‘One-Dimensional Man’ (1964).
It is valuable to look into ideas such Tech reproducing 1-Dimensional thought in individuals and society as a consequence of “introjection” from the outside (a psychoanalytic notion to be examined). Technology and mediated learning would cause a problem for 18th century Rousseau, but the modern-day Rousseau-inspired educational theorists: we hold on to the idea of an analytic over synthetic approach to education. Whether there are true or false needs at all, is also a question to address.
The writing is in the form of a dialogue, online. This is how the forum proceeds:
ACT 0: Positions.
ACT I: The Paradox of Technology.
ACT II: Deciphering True and False Needs.
ACT III: More critique.
The following project considers ‘memetics’ as a theory of the role of imitative dynamics in the genesis and development of human culture. This entails an exposition of memetics as the product of a series of conceptual transpositions between different practices and domains, which are tracked at length. Situating the object in question in the domain of fundamental anthropology (such circumscribing both cultural genesis and development), the concept applied to this object shall be René Girard’s ‘mimetic theory’ both with respect to its critique of a neglect of acquisitive, and therefore conflictual, mimesis pertaining broadly to theories of imitation, and its competing account of the function of imitation in the genesis and development of human culture. Having offset memetics with the theoretical conclusions of mimetic theory, the project shall conclude with an evaluation of memetics as an account of the role of imitative dynamics in human culture.
The intention of this project is to shed light on the experiences of a second-generation immigrant. It questions terminology like ‘the self’, and uses empirical research to explain the subconscious experiences which contributed to the confusion and frustration of constantly feeling displaced. In search of answers to resolve this, this project turns to philosophy.
Main texts referred to:
John Rawls and Liberalism: A Theory of Justice.
Michael Sandel and Communitarianism: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.
Zygmunt Bauman and Fluid Identities: Identity: Conversations With Benedetto Vecchi.
“If you recall that only a few decades ago ‘identity’ was nowhere near the centre of our thoughts, remaining but an object of philosophical meditation. Today, though, ‘identity’ is the loudest talk in the town’” 16-17. Zygmunt Bauman, Identity.
This project questions whether the ‘self’ should be seen as completely autonomous, or whether ‘identity’ is formed by interpersonal relationships and one’s environment. Or, are these theories outdated? Is a more current and less restrictive theory required?
In this project, I explore the contrasting legal systems, common law and civil code and compare them to my two principal philosophers:
– Jean-François Lyotard
– Plato
Additional philosophers I studied:
– Immanuel Kant
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
– Aristotle
– Socrates
The questions I focused on:
• Can we have a politics with or without a true essence of justice?
• Can we judge based on opinion, or based on prior criteria?
• Do legal systems work within situational context or universal formulas?
• What are the philosophical attributes embedded within legal systems?
I essentially wanted to establish the central aspects of the legal systems I am studying regarding how they view judgement. This was examined by determining whether judgement is based on the conformity of statutes and legislations or based on precedent. I determine that the civil law system’s rigid structure gives judges limited say in the outcome of cases as they abide by the law’s statutes. On the other hand, the common law works on precedent, using past cases to determine the conclusion of a case. Additionally, I compared the philosophical attributes of these two legal systems to the two philosophers I studied. I resolved that the common law generally related to Lyotard’s situational school of philosophy; judgement is based case-by-case without regard to prior criteria. Furthermore, Plato’s true essence of justice claims a universalism of judgement which coincides with the civil law system. Concluding, I argue the superiority of Lyotard’s philosophy and the common law system over the contrasting school of philosophy and legal system.
The theories that attempt to explain the derivation of meaning in art concerning the individual usually assume the original creator is one individual. Theatre however always contains three distinct creative groups in the formulation of a play. This dissertation aims to examine how theatre stands out amongst other art forms in the derivation of meaning due to the distinct creative groups involved in a theatre production.
I will be taking an autoethnographcial approach by applying the concepts to a performance of Hamlet that I was in and, by examining that experience, hopefully see if such theories accurately apply to theatre.
Both Buddhism and Nietzsche’s philosophy point in the direction of nothingness. Nietzsche studied Buddhism at a young age due to his training as a classical philologist and it most likely accompanied him throughout his life as one of the cornerstones to his thought alongside his great educator Schopenhauer. Buddhism as a philosophy lacks breadth and depth, unlike Nietzsche who is a far-reaching philosopher writing on many topics in a variety of ways. It is an articulation of the application of emptiness and becoming onto all things in the universe – subtle in its poetic method of reducing many things’ Being to empty becoming. Buddhism is direct yet allusive in its brevity, a feat somewhat lacking in Nietzsche’s numerous aphorisms: there is so much character and enthusiasm in Nietzsche’s many articulations of nothingness and his many affirmations of life, forcing the discussion at hand to demand that portions be ignored, to allow other parts to make sense. So that Nietzsche may compliment Buddhism and Buddhism may compliment Nietzsche, the discussion will dissect Nietzsche’s most pure nihilisms from his array of articulations and applications of nihilism, in order to be able to compare their likeness to one another. The discussion will likewise only have eyes for Madhyamaka interpretations of the Buddha’s doctrine through Nagarjuna. Importantly, Nietzsche and the Buddha will be discussed within the milieu of their contextual origin, which will poke at the purpose of their philosophy: the Buddha’s extinction through nirvana demanded by his Indian peers (post-Brahmanical annihilation), and Nietzsche’s edified affirmations of life, attempting to provide the facilities for all to see ‘it’ for what ‘it’ is, in Europe upon God’s death. This discourse is a deliberately polemical approach to nihilism for the sake of being able to discuss Nietzsche’s selected philosophy and Buddhism mutually, improving ones ability to see where the two agree and disagree at the cost of excessive hyperbole.
In my project I investigate the problem of modern politics, especially the absence of viable alternatives to our contemporary political system. I use climate change as an example of an issue that is limit testing the stability of the status quo. I use Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensional thought and Badiou’s ethical theory as examples of radical critique of stale political arrangement, and also thinkers inspired by them like Mark Fisher and his concept of Capitalist Realism.
Virtual Identities Vs. Authentic Selves: A Philosophical Investigation into Whether the Level of Value Society Offers to Hyperreal Identities Relates to Baudrillard’s Notion of ‘The Death of the Real’
This project aims to explore society’s immersion in technology or simulations of reality such as social media, with the idea this hyperreality is used to claim a second identity. This territory will be looked at more closely, by interpreting the value society places on virtual identity offered by the implosion of the new stimulating realm of technological experience such as social media and whether this contributes to losing a sense of authenticity and external reality which will point toward Baudrillard’s notion regarding the death of the real.
-Look at Taylor’s concept of webs of interlocution in ‘sources of the Self’ to show how society is able to learn identity, from being affected by others, in social spaces such as social media.
-Research the extent social media can affect society’s identities supported by a description of ‘Snapchat Dysmorphia’.
-Demonstrate how social media increases communities individuals are able to become a part of in granting a sense of identity.
-Look at Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity emphasising how the task of identity formation is incoherent and difficult in a world of flux.
Use Bauman’s concept cloakroom communities to describe how social media allows swapping of identity comes ease alluding to inauthenticity of virtual identity.
-Baudrillard’s concepts from his publication ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ used to describe simulations of reality and hyperreality of social media.
-Draw on how virtual identity is becoming further from the external reality and are the most real way we perceive people.
-Baudrillard’s Semiological theory will be used to explain why society values virtual identity of signs-value.
This essay explores the possibility of fusion, of becoming one with Siva, as it is expressed in the Vacanas (poems) of a 12th Century Siva devotee: Mahadevi. Considering the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan we can ask what it means to be liberated and to fulfil one’s desires in this way. Critically, we begin this essay with Levinas and discuss his conception of the self; how this self comes to be in relation to the other, and how freedom is to be understood. Following Levinas we investigate the notion of desire for Lacan, which requires a look into the Oedipus complex and the object petit a. In the final section of this essay, we attempt to find the position of Siva in relation to the subject and question whether fusion is finally possible. This will respond to what has been so far discussed in the hope of showing that Siva is not a being but is representative of the subject of my subjectivity – Levinas’ infinitely other – which is only attainable by being a self for the Other.
My project seeks to chart out an account of Dewey’s philosophy of education, relating to its practical application in the work of Lipman. I then present various current trends in the way that learning environments have changed both over the past few decades with reference to technological development, and in the last year with reference to the coronavirus pandemic. Ultimately, I argue that the main thing preventing a realization of Dewey’s democratic ideal is ‘datafication’, the phenomenon of reducing educational efficacy to quantifiable metrics and abstract information. Due to the insistence of Dewey and Lipman on education as a facilitation of meaningful experience, I hold, datafication makes the manifestation of any true practice of Deweyan pedagogy impossible.
This project looks at the question, ‘Is the age of social media marketing creating a warped sense of reality for Generation Z?’. This project explores and applies Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality as well as his theory of sign value, to the modern world of social media. As well as looking at areas such as fast fashion marketing and the effect social media can have on both mental health and our perception of reality.
Plagiarism is wrong. Says who? Why should we obey this? Does Plagiarism stifle creativity? Is plagiarism a force of coercion and obedience?
“To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world”
–
Anthony Burgess
We live in a society today in which privacy concerns seem to be cropping up more and more frequently. This essay basis its’ notion of a right to privacy on Warren and Brandeis’s article for the Harvard Law Review titled The Right to Privacy, and investigates the ways in which the culture today strikes down this right.
My essay focuses on the primary ways in which the notion of privacy has been struck down in the post 9/11 society that we live in. In doing this, I was able to use the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and John Rawls, among many other philosophers, to formulate a response to this abolition of privacy in the society we live in. Their philosophies provide us with a thoughtful response to the factors affecting our right to privacy, and henceforth allows for a thorough investigation into the notion of privacy from a perspective not entirely common.
‘Perhaps the most striking thing about the right to privacy is that nobody seems to have any very clear idea what it is.’
– Judith Jarvis Thomson
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist?” Schopenhauer
“Being brought into existence is not a benefit but always a harm” Benatar
“Our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move… What do we have to lose?” Ligotti
This project will investigate the claim that human existence is a value.
There tends to be a given assumption that human existence is a good thing. I intend to question the validity of this and investigate whether it has valid justification.
The effects of human existence will be considered from three perspectives to determine whether human existence is worth its costs.
An ethical perspective will be used to evaluate the suffering and harm evoked by and for human beings.
An environmental perspective will contemplate the impact human beings have had on the planet and the detrimental effects caused.
A positive perspective will be adopted to investigate whether human beings deserve respect. It will be questioned if something would be lost without us.
PLAYBOY
The use of nude photography does not exclude a work from the sphere of art
Featured Articles
Rose: The Paradigm case of Pornography-Playboy does not possess the same explicit sexual characteristics of other ‘adult’ entertainment.
-In the production of Playboy, there is no violation of liberty or victim.
Noë: ‘strange tools’ -art is purely the subversion of function and purpose, that calls into question the surrounding presuppositions -Playboy does not have his same subversion intention.
Hegel- the closest instance to absolute truth within art is the human form “we must search out that in Nature which on its own merits
belongs to the essence and actuality of the mind…The human form is employed…exclusively as the existence and physical form correspond to themind” (Hegel, 2004)
“O Father Consel, you are sorry for us. You can help us. We have nothing – no aircraft, no ships, no jeeps, nothing at all. The Europeans steal it from us. You will be sorry for us and send us something” – cargo cult prayer.
Jarvie, I.C. (1964). The Revolution in Anthropology. New York, Routledge. (p64)