School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemFictions, Knowledge, and Justice( 2023-10)Fictions are a cornerstone of human cultures: they are created, shared, discussed, modified, and valued. Yet, philosophical accounts which privilege the ‘classical knower’ struggle to explain how fictions can affect us so deeply. Further, the fact that fictions seem to impact broader society and whole populations is largely overlooked, despite being observed in other disciplines. In this talk, I will draw on theories from philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and epistemology to argue that fictions offer us epistemic resources of a unique kind, and that these resources lead to knowledge practices which can eventuate in harm."
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ItemBe a body: from experiential self-awareness to a truly bodily self( 2023-08)Dan Zahavi has defended a systematic and influential account of our most basic form of experiential self-consciousness, pre-reflective self-awareness (PRSA). For Zahavi, PRSA explicates the subtle way in which we are always immediately aware of the experiences we are having, are aware of them as being our experiences, and, in being so aware, are minimally self-aware. Zahavi’s model of PRSA (hereafter Z-PRSA) has proven influential in contemporary debates on the nature of self-consciousness and selfhood across analytic, Buddhist and continental philosophical traditions. However, one aspect of Zahavi’s model that is underdeveloped is its relation to the body. In his first major work, Self-Awareness and Alterity ([1999] 2020), Zahavi argued that Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily by drawing on the analyses of bodily self-experience developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Yet, in more recent works, Zahavi has either remained silent on the topic of the body or indicated newfound neutrality on the question of embodiment, without adequately accounting for this change. By contrast, over this period, body awareness has become the focal point of philosophical and empirical investigations into self-consciousness and minimal phenomenal selfhood. Various forms of body awareness have been proposed to play a foundational role in grounding self-consciousness: the sense of body ownership, proprioceptive self-awareness, interoceptive self-awareness, spatial self-awareness, and the implicit self-awareness we have in perceiving the world as ripe for bodily action. An important question arises of how these modalities of bodily self-consciousness relate to Z-PRSA. Should we identify Z-PRSA with one of these forms of bodily self-consciousness, in a deflationary move? Alternatively, does bodily self-consciousness constitute a phenomenological condition of possibility for Z-PRSA? To find an answer, in this thesis I examine a series of descriptive and transcendental phenomenological arguments to determine whether, as Zahavi originally claimed, Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily. I show first that Z-PRSA should not be identified with any of the above forms of bodily self-consciousness. Except for spatial self-awareness, they do not share with Z-PRSA its key phenomenological characteristics as a mode of awareness. While spatial self-awareness does, Zahavi’s strident opposition to any identity between it and Z-PRSA motivates me to consider an alternative connection between them: transcendental dependence. In evaluating Zahavi’s Husserlian enactivist argument from Self-Awareness and Alterity, I consider objections to its claim that object perception depends on spatial self-awareness, bodily movement, and kinaesthetic self-awareness. I show that Zahavi’s original argument for embodying Z-PRSA must be adapted to overcome an empirical challenge from cases of locked-in syndrome. While identifying a path for future research to more definitively determine the character of bodily experience in long-term locked-in syndrome, I provisionally conclude that the adapted argument succeeds in proving that Z-PRSA is only possible for a bodily subject of experience. Through my investigations, I aim to bring together a diversity of philosophical and empirical perspectives towards a perspicuous understanding of pre-reflective self-awareness and bodily self-experience.
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ItemSoma-masculinities: centring the body within studies of masculinities( 2018)Whilst feminist and queer scholarship have paid generous attention to bodies and embodiment in their attempts to better understand gender and sexuality, studies of masculinities have tended to lag behind. In this thesis, I attend to the theoretical strains within studies of masculinities to demonstrate that these studies are at an impasse, a point at which scholars remain reluctant or unable to push beyond current frameworks into new and, as I argue, productive territory. In particular, these studies have most readily employed social constructionist approaches in their analyses, typified by Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, however such frameworks have been unable to adequately describe and account for the complexities, contradictions and possibilities of masculinities and male subjectivities. I suggest that bodies are central to this understanding and must be brought into the frame in a more significant manner. Throughout this thesis I draw attention to the blind spot within these studies and attend to bodies more closely through an examination of contemporary masculinities. In particular I consider three specific sites of the body: the phallic, the hegemonic and the homosexual body. I interrogate these through a number of case studies, including pornography, Australian rules football and online dating sites, all of which continue to arouse interest and debate within academic and public spheres. It is here that I draw attention to some of the limitations of current studies and attempt to produce a richer account of the key questions and problems within these debates. In doing this, I introduce a new framework I call soma-masculinities which I employ to address masculinities in a more profound manner, and make some original contributions to the scholarship. In particular, this framework places a greater emphasis on the material body and its fleshy components; it aims to bring the flesh into bodies and questions of masculinity. Soma-masculinities is not one specific theory or concept but rather a mode of enquiry. Thus, it utilises a broad toolkit that incorporates conceptual models that are already available and engaged, particularly within feminist and queer theory. I demonstrate how this framework might offer a more capacious account of contemporary masculinities and the complex ways in which they are embodied and lived.
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ItemPhilosophical reflections on the pedagogy of the art museum: toward an experiential practice( 2017)This thesis investigates discourse and practice that has informed the pedagogy of the public art museum. The broad context for the thesis is recent museological research and institutional strategies that emphasise the subjective and collective agency of audience. Contemporary scholarly reflection on museums gives attention to the active agency of audiences in the process of knowledge production, thus reflecting concern for a social relationship between things and people. Focussing on education programming for adult audiences this thesis brings into question the efficacy of traditional pedagogical practice in the contemporary art museum. It argues that programming underpinned by ideas of expert art historical knowledge no longer hold authority over how contemporary museum audiences view or interpret works of art. Examination of the epistemological foundation of museum pedagogy is critical to redistribute knowledge and practice in order to augment the potentialities of the art museum’s educational impact and import. Education can no longer be thought of on the model of a straightforward transfer of information from one who knows to many who do not, but conceived in a more emancipatory and transformative way. The confluence of art and education in the museum cannot be about art alone. Beyond knowledge about art lies the possibility of knowing oneself, in solitude, and in community with others, through art. Museum pedagogy requires a broader disciplinary base in order to trace the relations between viewing works of art in the museum and the life-world of visitors. The thesis is premised on an understanding of art as a unique form of knowledge that exceeds its historical framing. Art asks or wants something of us as beholders, it insists in the performative and sensual dynamics involved in making and engaging with the world. It therefore implicates the agency of the viewer; potentially prompting prolonged engagement and speculation. Combining historical analysis with philosophical investigation the thesis establishes germane theoretical ground for an emergent pedagogic praxis that recognises human agency in learning and the importance of aesthetics. It is not within the scope of the thesis to present a method or pedagogic model; a single model does not serve the cause of museum education. The thesis is an interdisciplinary study weighted toward philosophical reflections that orient toward an experientially nuanced pedagogy. The research method draws on the philosophical thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer, John Dewey, Jacques Rancière and Immanuel Kant whose work in different, but significant ways provide orienting ideals and principles toward the articulation of an emancipatory hermeneutic pedagogy.
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ItemSublime flesh: a Merleau-Pontian alternative to Deep Ecology( 2015)In this thesis, I bring the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to bear on Deep Ecology, arguing that Merleau-Ponty enables us to abandon Deep Ecology’s problematic emphasis on identity and the self while remaining faithful to its overarching commitment to a biospherical moral community. I begin by showing that despite the laudable commitments that underpin Deep Ecology’s program for improving humans’ relationship with nature, the conceptual schema it embraces in articulating that program is inadequate. This is because Deep Ecology relies on and so reinforces the very account of human behaviour – according to which we are inherently self-centered agents – that it admirably seeks to overcome. This emphasis, I suggest, is motivated by Deep Ecology’s failure to articulate our being in a community with others in a way that can accommodate both sameness and difference. Merleau-Ponty’s description of the body/world and self/other dialectics provides a means for doing just this. His description of our relationship with nature would do better at promoting the kind of comportment towards it that Deep Ecology seeks to precipitate. While an environmental ethic consistent with the Merleau-Pontian framework would enable us to remain true to the spirit of Deep Ecology, it would represent a serious departure from and improvement to Deep Ecology – calling us to abandon concern with the self and pay an ever-renewed, respectful attention to that which is other. This vision of ethical agency, which I elucidate via a Merleau-Pontian reading of the sublime, opens up new and attractive possibilities for approaching contemporary environmental issues – possibilities that are not, moreover, available to the Deep Ecologist.
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ItemDasein's temporal enaction: Heideggerian temporality in dialogue with contemporary cognitive science( 2015)This thesis argues that Heidegger’s accounts of practice and temporality in Being and Time are inseparable, and demonstrates the importance of temporality for contemporary dialogues between Heideggerian phenomenology and cognitive science. It proposes that enactive and action-oriented models of cognition are best suited to engaging with a Heideggerian view of the temporality of practice, and will benefit from the latter’s capacity to explain the purposive self-concern, possibility-directedness, and varying complexity of cognition in richly temporal terms. I begin by showing that Heidegger’s account places temporality and practice in a complex reciprocity in which each fundamentally shapes and permeates the other. The Heidegger of Being and Time conceptualises practice as fundamentally temporal and temporality as intrinsically purposive, meaning that we cannot adequately understand or utilise his analysis of either structure without acknowledging the role of the other. In outlining and defending this reading, I draw out two characteristics of Heidegger’s model of temporality; these features, which affect and are affected by the interconnection of temporality and purposiveness, are an inherent connection to the self-concern of the entity and an emphasis upon a radically indeterminate futurity. I then consider which contemporary approaches in cognitive science represent the most promising interlocutors for this temporality-oriented Heideggerian perspective. After rejecting selected in principle objections to the pursuit of a collaborative, rather than primarily critical, dialogue between Heideggerian phenomenology and cognitive science, I put forward two candidates for participation in a ‘temporality-oriented Heideggerian cognitive science’: the enactivist tradition and Michael Wheeler’s model of cognition. I set out each approach’s connections to Heideggerian thought (which involves arguing for as-yet unexplored links as well as defending existing ones) before showing how and why a Heideggerian conception of temporality can be integrated into both. I suggest that the structures of a Heideggerian model of temporality already resonate with and operate in enactivists’ and Wheeler’s analyses of cognition, and outline how I think each framework benefits from explicitly taking up and developing these connections. Rather than ultimately choosing one of these perspectives over the other, I conclude by proposing that they cooperate with one another. A Heideggerian conception of temporality opens up a space for enactivism and Wheeler’s approach to contribute distinct and complementary insights in the pursuit of a collaborative temporality-oriented Heideggerian cognitive science.
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ItemThe early Heidegger’s Aristotle: the logic of possibility( 2013)The argument of this thesis is that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the early 1920s is best understood after we have come to terms with the critique that Heidegger develops against theoretical attitude. By understanding how Heidegger determines the limitations of the theoretical attitude we can grasp the scope of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology that takes up the task of overcoming of those limitations. In particular this thesis follows the development of an underlying opposition in Heidegger’s work from 1919 to 1924. This opposition is staged around competing interpretations of the structural elements at work in the actualisation of research. Specifically these structural-logical elements are the understanding of unity and simplicity within the contexts of vision, speech and action that underlie the way that research takes up an object and understands its own possibilities and ends. When read in this way Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is a demonstration of possibilities of research that are invisible to theoretical attitude. As we have followed Heidegger’s reconstructions of Aristotle what emerges is a representation of Aristotle’s work where Heidegger attempts to alter our presuppositions about the possibility of research and thereby alter our understanding of Aristotle’s texts. The fundamental strategy of this alteration of presuppositions is to draw out the incompatibility of the structural-logical elements as employed by the modern philosophical positions criticised by Heidegger and the research carried out by Aristotle; this thesis makes this strategy explicit. To carry out the argument we move from establishing an understanding of Heidegger’s critique of the theoretical attitude in chapter one, to examining the ways that alternative research projects may be carried out in chapter two, and then finally to closely examining Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle in 1923 and 1924 in chapters three and four. The four chapters together show how Heidegger’s arguments about the role of formalisation in research lead directly into the fundamental element in Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle, which is the conception the human being as being primarily in logos. With this new understanding of the nature of the human being insofar as it can do research and be the object of research comes an accompanying theory of both the nature of language and a rejection of the division of mind and world.