Philosophy Senior Essays

2022 Senior Essays 

Hank Bedingfield, "The Public Sphere and The Fight For Inclusive Language"

Claire Bogart, "Anthropocentrism in Ethology"

Miranda Dickerman, "The Transformative Potential of Language in Freire and Lacan"

Ben King-Hails, "How to Change Your Mind: A Comparison of Psychoanalytic and Buddhist Methods"

Lucy Meigs, "The Absurd Person: Camus and Queer Existentialism"

Sophie Murphy, "Understanding the Complexities of Love through Plato's Forms and Aristotle's Particulars"

Alex Puza, "In-Betweenness and the Anthropocene: Japanese Existentialism and Environmental Ethics"

Daniel Teplow, "The Self in the Digital Era"

 

2021 Senior Essays 

Marve Romero Aguinaga, “Our Gente’s Joy is Worth Capturing: Understanding the Effects of Gentrification on Latinx Communities”

Finn Bingham, “Humans, the Importance of Diverse Experience, and Social Media”

Andrew Braswell, “Consciousness, Considerability and Computers”

Esteban Candelaria, “Realizing Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of History in the Struggle for Black Liberation”

Fisher Gates, “Suffering for the Other”

Yumiko Gonzalez Rios, “Not Everyone Is Mortal”

Evan Hirshorn, “Biopolitics and Plasticity”

Spencer Janney, “Gnosis of the Absolute: A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Experience of Unity”

Molly Lovett, “The Return of Particularity: Discovering the Subject”

Will Mallory, “Ethics and Determinism in Spinoza’s Ethics”

Matthew Simons, “It's Just Semantics”

George Ward, “Language-Games and the Object in Wittgenstein and Foucault”

Greta Wu, “Transhumanism: Evolution and Diversity”

2020 Senior Essays 

Max Chiaramonte, "The Screen as a Cage"

Anne Daley, "Hidden Frames: The Role of Framing in the Development of Normative Ideals"

Zoe Fried, "Liminality, Difference, and Displacement in Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa"

Cat Gill, "Contemplating Mortality and Overcoming Absurdity"

Daniel Lawrence, "Toleration in Pluralistic Societies"

Max Pil, "Quantum Panpsychism: Does the Theory Hold Up to Scrutiny"

Will Reohr, "Finding Individuality"

Anton Rieselbach, "The Impossibility of Resistance in the Age of the Spectacle: Guy Debord on Praxis"

Matt Rosen, "Resistance and the Flesh: On Henry’s Incarnation"

Murray Rosenbaum, "The Adult/Child Dialectic: A Recrafting of Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage"

Ben Sudduth, "Human Interaction in Heidegger’s Technological World"

Henry Swain, "Psychoanalysis in Marketing"

Natalie TeSelle, "Vital Materialism and Self-Valuing: Agency and Ethics in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter"

2019 Senior Essays

Lowell Bisio, "Prolegomena to Any Future Realism"

Andrew Bolte, "A Novel Spirituality: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Conception of Divinity as a Remedy for the Modern World"

Theo Buchanan, "A Confucian Critique of Selfish Rationality"

Ethan Cutler, "Erich Fromm and Byung-Chul Han On Our Self-Defeating Freedom"

Tselate Dawit, "Development of the Self Based on John Dewey's Philosophy"

Lena Farr-Morrissey, "My Body Knows Unheard-of Songs"

Carson Fritz, "The War-of-Position under Empire and the Praxis of Freedom"

Noah Gaby, "Life without God: How Camus Can Help Us to Live without Faith and Meaning"

Landis Hackett, "Call for Further Questioning concerning Technology: Exploitation, Non-Neutral Tools, and Nature"

Qian (Alice) Huang, "Merleau-Ponty and the Making of the World"

Paxton Hyde, "Qualifying Hume's Sentimentalist Defense against Moral Relativism"

Matthew Kwak, "Peirce and Science's Relation to the External World"

Carmen Rafaelita Lucero, "Necessary Ambiguity: A Critique of Essentialist Gender Assumptions in Analytic Psychology"

Jesse Phillips, "A Paradigm Case of a Modern Disease: Dostoevsky on Intellectualism"

2018 Senior Essays

Silas Babilonia, "Socrates, Plato, and the Cave: Death of the Real"

Nicholas Dobbs, "21st Century Stoicism: An Argument for the Sage's Path"

Mira Fisher, "The Humormensch: Farcing the Void"

Ben Garfin, "Rethinking Agency with Zhuangzi: Flowing with the River"

Matthew Harris, "Knowledge and Governance: Skepticism in the Zhuangzi"

Andrew Hill, "Anthropocentrism and the Origins of Consciousness"

Michaela Miller, "The Ontological Argument: Can We Finally Say that God Really Exists?"

Lachlan Nutting, "Individuality in the Objective Order of Values: An Examination of Max Scheler's Ordo Amoris"

William Pak, "From the Aesthetic to the Ethical: Strip-Mining the Self, in a State of Despair"

Cameron Pattison, "Illusion and the Contest between Passion and Reason"

Joe Purtell, "Faith and Action: What Does It Mean to Try the Impossible?"

Lauren Robinson, "Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds: An Exploration of Meaningful Coincidences"

Jared Russell, "Hope's Role Within the Present"

Will Schneiger, "Threats of Replacement in Nuclear Catastrophes"

Antonio Soto, "The Existence of God"

Sam Stallings, "Bad Faith of Whiteness: Whiteness as Capital within the Colonial Matrix of Power"

Izzy Steucek, "Lingering with the Wonder of the World: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger"

Samuel White, "Behavioral Abnormality and the Social Experience of Agency"

2017 Senior Essays

Corey Baron, "Reasoning and Presence: Investigating the Nature of Thought"

Georgia Bermingham, "Is Quantum Mechanics a Helpful Framework for Thinking through Foucault's Description of Power?"

TJ Brannen, "The 'Close Enough' Question in Searle's Chinese Room"

Eliza Brilliant, "Unraveling a Body without Organs"

Lykkefry Bonde, "A God Called Love: Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky on Love, Logic, and Growth"

Giseleine Dogon, "Moving Music: An Exploration of How Music Affects Emotion"

Joel Fisher-Katz, "Second Breath/Second Sound: Listening with the Trouble"

Jason Gutierrez, "Wittgenstein on Truths"

Scott Godde, "A Biological Bridge: Maslow's Response to Hume's Is-Ought Challenge"

Mollie Podmore, "The Face-to-Face Encounter: A Heideggerian Lens to Environmental Virtue Ethics"

Thomas Roberts, "Does God Exist?: Pivoting from Metaphysics to Morality with Kant"

Andrew Sanger, "Nelson Goodman, Eraserhead, and Film Worlds"

Andrew Scherffius, "Information Operations: Marketing and the Militarization of Information in the Network Age"

Yuxi Wang, "The Choice between Either/Or: Aesthetic Life as a Response"

Christian Wulff, "Concepts of Soul"

Alice Xiang, "On Time"

2016 Senior Essays

Brett Baekey, "The Gaze of the Blind"

Niall Griffin, "Dennett Goes in for the Will"

Teelin Lucero, "Cultivating the Wreckage: Heidegger and Mignolo Take on Modernity"

Willow Mindich, "Memory, Narrative and Identity: A Poetics of the Self"

Vanessa Rivas-Bernardy, "Where History Meets Fiction: Truth and Temporality in Narrative"

Mercedes Whitman, "Flamingo Croquet: Philosophical Inquiries and Anthropological Strategies in a Strange and Difficult Game"

2015 Senior Essays

Charlotte Allyn, "The Relevance of Personal Experience to Aesthetic Judgment: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Judgment"

Sara Bermingham,"Schopenhauer: Is the Game Worth the Candle?"

Justine Epstein, "Learning to Mourn: An Ethics of Survival"

Julia Kelley, "Foucault and Individuals: The Will to Struggle"

Austin Langsdorf, "Mind and Consciousness"

Sari Lesem, "Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida: Reimagining Our Technological Chokehold"

Jake Levitan, "After Fukushima: The Urgency of Emerging from Our Contemporary Crisis of Meaning"

Kyle Lutz, "The Brothers Karamazov: Rational Egoism, Shaky Ground in Christian Altruism, and a Buddhist Re-Orientation"

Emma Schiestl, "The Morality of Love"

Will See, "'Owning' Experience"

Margeaux Settineri, "Building Dwelling Thinging: A Heideggerian Edification of the Kohutian Self and Selfobject"

Nat Stein, "Two Frenchmen et Moi: An Essay on Truth and Style"

Mike Stevens, "Space Unbounded"

Alex Suber, "Temporality, Perception and Memory: Henri Bergson Goes to the Cinema"

Erika Versalovic, "And So It (Lo)Goes"

2014 Senior Essays

Monika Abraham, "Reconciling Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism: A Metaphysical Ethics"

Dylan Crow, "Nietzsche and the Übermensch"

Noah Greenstein, "Developing a Philosophical Conception of Health and Being through a Reconceptualization of the Mind-Body Problem"

Maria Keller, "Hannah Arendt: Thinking as a Way of Living"

Peter Laskey, "Individual and Group Identities: Charles Taylor and the American Legal System"

Marina Long, "An Ethics of Ambiguity: Influences and Historical Context in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir"

Kevin Lowe, "The Quest for Certainty and 'Criminality'"

Griffin Ludwig, "The Development of the Social Realm, and Its Role in Hannah Arendt's Critique of Modernity"

Haley Montgomery, "Montaigne: On Solitude, or Savoir Être a Soi"

Sydney Provan, "Hegel and Foucault: The Dialectic of Modern Society"

Gracie Ramsdell, "Heidegger and Montessori: On Thinking and Education"

Luke Rasmussen, "The Origin of Passion"

Mark Riley, "On Originality"

Jake Russin, "Imagining a Single Level of Explanation"

Ellen Turner, "Foucault and Massage: Discourse and the Modern Medical Experience"

Henry Fulton Winship, "Eros and Affect: Philosophy as Encountering the Other"

2013 Senior Essays

Andrew Allen-Fahlander, "Seduction and Simulation: Baudrillard's Radical Phenomenology"

Ashley Amato, "Camus' Endeavor into the Homeland"

Reginald Anderson, "The Validity of Lived Experience in Fanonian Postcolonialism"

Kelsey Bergeson, "Love, Literature, and Ethical Life: Martha Nussbaum and the Other as Subject"

Ben Birtch, "Where Is the Polis? A Critical Exploration of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Its Modern Implications"

Brielle Brilliant, "The Close-Up as Infinite Distance"

Zachariah Chapman, "The Immediate Revealer: Jacques Derrida and the Social-Networking Archive"

Alexei Desmarais, "Overcoming Nietzsche: An Analysis of Überwindung and Parallel Themes in Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra"

Patrick Hardy, "Jung's Zarathustra"

John Keenan, "Derrida's Khora and the Architecture of Deconstruction"

Pat Knecht, "A Heideggarien Calamity of Thinking: Health and Technology in the West"

Nick Lammers, "Faith, Irony, and Authenticity: A Foray into the Enigmas of Selfhood"

Kristen Moree, "Order and Creativity in Society: Locating the Structure of Experience in Alfred North Whitehead's Process of Metaphysics"

Nick Ohman, "To Confront in the Photograph the Wakening of Intractable Reality"

Maggie Ruble, "The Formation of Identity through Love"

Ben Sandalow, "Young and McLuhan: Moving beyond Enlightened Realism"

William Sheehan, "Acquitting and Re-Indicting Hume: Examining 'Of Miracles'"

Armantin Varona, "1% Schopenhauer"

Andrew Vierra, "No-Self and Ethics in Nishida Kitaro's Zen no Kenkyuu"

Harlan Webster, "Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and an Inclusive Democratic Order"

Charis Whitnah, "Lordship and Bondage: A Hegelian Approach to the Problem of Domestic Violence"

Madeleine Zusman, "Levinas: On Escape and the Good beyond Being"

2012 Senior Essays

Max Alpert, "Conceptual Foundations of Neuroscience: The Determinism Problem"

Graham A. Borgman, senior essay on Fanon

Jacob C. Brownell, "The Subversive Self: Tracing the Cultural Critique Inherent in Kierkegaard's Conception of Authentic Selfhood"

Daniel Y. Corman, senior essay on Peter Kivey and Schopenhauer

Maggie Edmunds, "Freedom, Spontaneity, and Ambition in the Hegelian Tradition"

Vita Emery, "Levinas' Ethics of the Other: An Answer to Heidegger's Unfinished Project"

Robert E. Florance, "Preserving Difference, Expanding Language: The Task of the Translator"

Cara S. Greene, "On Violence: Heidegger's Geist and Derrida's Phantom"

Kieffer Katz, "Love thy Other as thy Self"

Elena M. Ketelsen, senior essay on Benjamin

Bridger Langfur, "What Would Plato Do? A Platonic Look at the Dangers of Competition and the Power of Education"

Brendan Mehnert O'Donoghue, "The Nature of Improvisation in Music and Its Aesthetic Grounding"

Margaret Osgood, "So He Said, and Thus It Was"

J. Stuart Pidcock, "Emptiness and The Dance of Two Truths"

Erik Rieger, "Creating the World Anew: Deleuze and the Political in Anti-Oedipus"

Gretchen L. Stempf, "The Authenticity of the Individual in Existentialism: A Look into the Fictional Characters of Dostoevsky and Sartre"

Andrew R. Streight, "Hegelian Practical Norms in Contemporary Politics"

Garland M. ("Max") Thorn, senior essay on Aristotle

2011 Senior Essays

Ethan M. Baer, "Composition: Prophecy and the Enigma"

Bahman Batmanghelidj, senior essay on Psychoanalysis

Marie V. Blanc, "Race and Inherited Guilt"

Joel L. Bock, "A New Foundation for Being: Heidegger's Interpretation of Dialectic in Plato's 'Sophist'"

Torrey M. Hata, "Kant's Symbolic Relationship of Beauty and Morality"

Madeline S. Mindich, "Merleau-Ponty's Conception of the Body against the Cartesian"

Andrew J. Parks, "The Concept of Power/Knowledge and the Importance of Genealogy"

Zachary R. Podmore, "Derrida's Critique of Levinas on the Ethical Other"

Christopher L. Shambaugh, "Negri and Hardt on Hegemony"

Isaac L. Smith, "Baudrillard on the Nature of Evil"

Rebecca O. Spira, "Derrida's Critique of Sovereignty"

Kristen E. Sweeney, "The Theory of the Soul in Plato's Republic"

 2010 Senior Essays

Zach Bailey, "Whitehead's Framework for Identity"

Nathan Brand, "A Modern Critique of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics"

Tracy Fields, "The Limits of Liberation: An Analysis of Gender in Frantz Fanon's Construction of Decolonization"

Julia Hathaway, "The Discourse of Care and Love: Necessities for a Meaningful Life"

John Knight, "The Character of Being: Historical Dwelling in Martin Heidegger's Work"

Anh Lai, "Learning from Narcissus: Kohut and the Nature of the Self"

Elizabeth Ludwig, "Hannah Arendt and Human Action: An Exploration in the Possibility of Individual Resistance"

Michael McGeary, "Searle: Biological Naturalism"

Peter Quirsfeld, "Manhattanism: What Is It to Define, Construct, and Dwell in the Modern City"

Sarah Schulte, "Braving the Precipice: Nietzsche on the Eternal Recurrence of Life and the Affirmation of One's Fate"

Victoria Silver, "An Examination of Friendship, Love and Politics: Experiencing Jacques Derrida in His Politics of Friendship"

Hannah Wallis, "Nietzsche's Adaptation to Knowledge: Creation as the Last Refuge of Truth"

 

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