Grant Brown

This paper uses Ricoeurian phenomenology to present an account of the reality of educational places such as classrooms. It contends that an “educational place” is where educational events occur, and that classrooms are a specific institutional instantiation of this general category. The position maintains that through the stretching of temporality from an “instant” to an “event” and spatiality from a “space” to a “place,” one finds the conditions for understanding the way that events and places have a reciprocal constitution which allows the crucial movement within education from a merely subjective experience into a fully intersubjective “world.”

Despite a lack of standardized education in philosophy throughout American public high schools, each year thousands of students spend their evenings and weekends learning about ethical issues through Lincoln-Douglas debate. This paper discusses Lincoln-Douglas as a vehicle for philosophical education and its relationship to the history of philosophy and academic canon. I argue that compared to academic philosophers, debaters interpret, appropriate, and experience the history of philosophy in a heterodox fashion. I defend this approach as pedagogically meaningful insofar as it puts students in a position to experience philosophy as vital within their lives. I advance this argument with Gilles Deleuze’s phenomenological concept of “ethology,” which describes individuals as subjectivities constituted by both affective relations and perceptual experiences that work together to compose an existential world that is the horizon of their lives. I conclude with the development of the concept of “philosophical roleplaying” in order to examine the way that experience with philosophical concepts in Lincoln-Douglas debate influences student’s worldviews. I maintain that while the history of philosophy must serve a grounding guide for education in philosophy, it ought not limit a student’s creative insights or hinder their own horizon of thought.

This philosophical investigation interrogates the relationship between G.W.F. Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the critique and reformulation of it by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. As a means of contextualization and expansion of Hegel’s original textual account, I consider Susan Buck-Morss’ seminal defense through grounding the dialectic in Hegel’s possible historical knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. I maintain that despite a compelling picture, Buck-Morss’ insights are unable to fully vindicate Hegel from the rebukes of Fanon, and as a result, Hegel’s phenomenology necessitates a concrete analysis of the actual conscious experiences of the racialized and colonized subject in order to realize its aims. In pursuit of this critical methodology, I develop the upshot and positive movement of Fanon’s critique through what I describe as a “phenomenology of flesh” in conversation with Maurice Merleau Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, writing together from 1972 to 1992, developed a robust body of theoretical work exemplar of the French poststructuralist tradition. Through their magnum opus, a two-part series entitled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” they interrogated the nature of desire, the organizational schemas of society, and the metaphysical structure of the world. Yet, despite claiming to have produced a thoroughly egalitarian project, their work is subject to a variety of exclusionary developments and cultural limitations. This paper attempts to traverse these deficiencies through speculative ecological and theological engagements with the work of Deleuze and Guattari. These engagements begin with the development of “schizoanalytical theology,” an application of their theory of schizoanalysis which disrupts transcendental views of divinity to ground spirituality in the creativity of desire and variability of ecological processes. This is followed by an exploration of the theories of Édouard Glissant, a Francophone theorist from Martinique whose work, heavily influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, is centered around the development of an ontology consistent with the cultural experiences of the colonized. Glissant’s interpretation of, and departure from, Deleuze and Guattari is explored for insights into how their theory may corrected and refigured to be responsive to the nuances of both minority perspectives and the ecological crisis. The paper is closed with a dialogue between Guattari’s theory of “ecosophy” and Glissant’s socio-cultural views on ecology, showing the application, and flexibility, of schizoanalytical theology to a variety of modern crises which find their culmination in ecological degradation.