Cynthia Gayman

The aim of this dissertation is to focus on subjectivity in a normative sense and to suggest a necessary relation between the freedom to be "fully" oneself and justice. Through exploration of texts by Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Emmanuel Levinas, I attempt to trace the relation of subjectivity to goodness, and to show that the freedom of subject to be is grounded in the first place as responsibility. The point I want to make in this project ultimately is that it is possible to speak meaningfully of the freedom to be oneself only with reference to a transcendent measure, against which the expression of oneself in one's humanitas or as kath hauto can be witnessed. This measure I am calling justice. In the respective works of Arendt, Weil, and Levinas, justice as the transcendent measure of the subject's freedom is neither argued nor inferred. Yet, for all three thinkers what it means to be oneself is inextricably bound to the responsibility one bears for one's place and life in the world among other human beings. And for each of these philosophers the responsibility of the subject, which lies at the root of his or her freedom, stands in relation to that which lies altogether outside the subject. It is the relation of the subject to transcendence that I want to describe through an analysis of themes elucidated by Arendt, Weil, and Levinas, and thereby show what I propose here: that justice informs the freedom of the subject to fully be himself or herself. But this is not to say that freedom is the reward of justice or that it is justly rewarded. For Arendt, Weil, and Levinas, each a thinker grounded in the tradition of Existential and Phenomenological philosophy, no hidden telos directs meaning in being; no innate capacity directs human beings to the good. For each of these three thinkers it is the dearth of goodness and the lack of justice in human existence that inspires their respective points of departure for explicating the freedom to be as the responsibility of being. I want to say that their unique and distinctive texts already intimate what I wish to argue here: that it is in view of justice transcendent to freedom that the responsibility of the subject has measure and meaning

When the Bible salesman is invited to stay for dinner, Hulga Hopewell immediately recognizes the young man sitting across the table from her as something true to type, a pitiable exemplar of those her mother would classify as "good country people," which happens to be the title of Flannery O'Connor's 1955 short story where this scene takes place (see 1978). 1 Hulga's assessment of Manley Pointer is a preliminary judgment and as such is not particularly perceptive. It signifies what John Dewey calls "recognition," which is "a beginning of an act of perception" cut short, or "perception arrested before it has a chance to develop freely" (2005, 54). Unlike mere recognition, perception requires the work of ..

In this article I argue against the rights‐based framework defining the abortion debate, and do so by considering the views of Beth Singer, a philosopher whose work conveys a broadly pragmatist formulation of traditional rights‐based language. Although Singer's schema presents a fruitful vantage point from which to consider the abortion question through the discourse of rights, even Singer's use of the language of rights ultimately fails adequately to address the subject. I challenge Singer's view by taking up John Dewey's concept of reflective morality, elucidated in his 1932 Ethics.

Humor is part of the "complex all" of human experience, and meanings may be discerned and action evaluated in relation to the risible. Not every evocation of laughter is funny. Life's little jokes on us may teach us to take ourselves less seriously or humble our expectations, as Mary Magada-Ward and Jessica Wahman argue in their respective papers on Charles Peirce and George Santayana. Yet this evaluation of humor in view of its benefits assumes too much, for humor must first be conceived as an object of reflection, in the Deweyan sense, in order to be given more serious consideration

While the varied theoretical frameworks of second wave feminism made possible critical interrogation of societal patterns of domination and oppression in view of the transformative goal of liberation, Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of power shifts contemporary feminist thought away from this binary field of relations towards more fundamental questions about gender constitution. Indeed, from the perspective of popular culture it would seem that challenges to rigid gender roles were a thing of the past, to which freedom and certain kinds of gender malleability were intrinsically tied. In fact gender roles continue to be defined in strict opposition to each other and sexist attitudes and practices continue, although increasingly disguised and unacknowledged. If liberation from the strictures of patriarchy is nothing but a lost illusion from the second wave, is there nonetheless a need for a resurgent feminist consciousness today? In this paper, I argue that this is the case, and attempt to show that “the work of the intellect” described by Foucault, must first be catalyzed by an experiential disruption, leading to recognition of what pragmatist philosopher John Dewey described as the “problematic situation.” While both Foucault and Dewey emphasize the necessity of problematization, Dewey’s methodology includes focus on envisioning desired outcomes. Here, my aim is not to resurrect an old idea of unconditioned liberation, but merely to reconsider whether and how experiential disruption and subsequent consideration of the problem might lead to a shift in social and self-consciousness, and create the possibility for change

I argue that a number of non-utopian accounts of ethical progress—specifically, those offered by Wiggins, Moody-Adams, and Rorty—face a trade-off between objectivity and the radical revision of values. I suggest that each of these views is unsatisfactory because they face the Goldilocks problem—none of the views is able to get the trade-off between objectivity and radical revision of values “just right.” Moody-Adams and Wiggins offer accounts which are too conservative with regard to ethical progress in not allowing radical revision of values, while Rorty’s account is too liberal in not maintaining enough objectivity. Despite thisdifficulty, however, I conclude on an optimistic note about the potential of non-utopian accounts of progress. I sketch out a Dewey-inspired view of progress which I believe can overcome the Goldilocks problem.