Research & Work

Students in the Department of Philosophy combine deep intellectual analyses of important philosophers with a robust and comprehensive survey of important ideas, reflecting an understanding of both thinker and thought. Their research and writing, under the guidance of our renowned faculty, influence the field and reshape the modern understanding of ideas.

Recent Philosophy Dissertations 

2024

Lucas Ballestin
Illusion Terminable and Interminable: Truth, Defense, and Ideology

Jeremy Gauger
Finding Space for Time: History at the Nexus of Nature and Society

Eva Perez de Vega Steele
The Architecture of HuMan Exceptionalism: Redrawing our Relationship with other Species

Marianna Poyares
Data Solidarity: Communities, Territories, Data Anomalies, and the Coalition for a New Commons

2023

Alexander Christoff Altonji
Moral Distance: The Significance of Acknowledgment

Jonathan Hausler Berk
Kant’s Copernican Experiment: An Interpretation of the "Critique of Pure Reason"

Teresa Casas Hernández
Mimetic Resistance: From Ancient Greek Theater to Contemporary Greek Theater

Kelly Joan Gawel
The Contradictions of Care: Violence and Revolution in Caring Relations

Pedro Mauricio Garcia Dotto
Plato, Persuasion, and Psychagogy: An Interpretation of the "Phaedrus"

Tomás Lima Pimenta
The Eclipse of the Political: On Liberal Distrust and Authoritarianism

Philip Schauss
Backgrounds in Architecture: Besides Aesthetics and Function

2022

Carlos de la Puente
The Unconscious, Drive and Desire in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Ryan Anders Gustafson
Institutions in Deconstruction: A New Reading of Jacques Derrida’s Social and Political
Philosophy

Lisa Michelle McKeown
The Art of Acknowledgment: Rethinking How Speech Acts

Miguel José Paley De Greiff
The Concept of Affect in the Philosophy of Henri Bergson

Daniel John Christian Wagnon
The Logic of Common Sense and the Refutation of Global Skepticism: A Parallax Study
of Ordinary Language Philosophy and Phenomenology

Benjamin Norris
Absolute Realism: Schelling and the Vortex of Spinozism

2021

Daniel Boscov-Ellen
After the Flood: Political Philosophy in the Capitalocene

Pablo Bustinduy Amador 
The Empty Space of Modern Politics. Metaphysics of Space and Political Universalism at the Advent of the Modern Age

Teresa Casas Hernández 
On theatrical practice and philosophy: an exploration in Ancient and Modern Greek theater

Carolyn Colsant 
Irony: Both Dangerous and Necessary

Joel Thomas Paxton de Lara
How Should I Know? Talking of Knowledge with Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell

Thomas Hughes
The Epistemological Implications of Dedekindian Set Theory in the Formation of Mathematical and Scientific Concepts in the Thought of Ernst Cassirer

Anna Katsman
Spirit and the Concept: On the Relationship between Hegel’s "Phenomenology of Spirit" and "Science of Logic"

John Noras
Here and Now: A Phenomenological Account

Benjamin Norris
Absolute Realism: Schelling and the Vortex of Spinozism

Daniel Richmond
Countervailing Possibility: Metaphysical, Epistemic, and Practical Issues of Possibility in Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Bloch

Caecilie Varslev-Pedersen 
Violent Sacrifices and Ambiguous Reconciliations: Critiques of Modernity in Schiller, Hegel, and Kierkegaard

Daniel Wagnon
Phenomenology, Ordinary Language Philosophy, and Common Sense Realism

Nikolay Tugushev
Freedom and Error

2020

David Bak Geler
Practical Improvisation: Rule-Following, Spontaneity and Democracy

Hannes Charen
Family Portraits Political Theology of Kinship

Joshua Nicholas Pineda
Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing: Theory and Critique in the Marxist and Post-Marxist Traditions

Angelica Maria Blomberg Stathopoulos
Passivity: Essays in Ontology and Ethics

Brandyn Heppard 
The Revolution Must Be Funny: The Liberatory and Revolutionary Power of Comedy

Marcus Michelsen
A Genealogical Reading of Wittgenstein

Emilio Andres Vicuna Zauschkevich
HORIZON AND FINITUDE. HUSSERLIAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE FRAGILITY OF EXPERIENCE

2019

Juniper Alcorn
Pregnancy Beyond the Natural

Michael Becker
In the Spirit of Critique: Critical Theory in Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit"

Jacob Blumenfeld
The Property Relation: Freedom, Right and Recognition in Kant, Fichte and Hegel

Kathleen Kelley
Automatism is a Humanism: Cavell, Medium, and Modernism

2018

Jacob Browning
Inventing Perceptual Content: The Given from Kant to McDowell

Jeremy Butman
Terrestriality: The Critique of Metaphysics and the Concept of the Planet

Robert Grimwade
Excess and Reflection: Beauty, Sublimity, and the Sensuous in the Aesthetics of Kant, Schopenhauer, and the Early Nietzsche

Edward Guetti
Conspicuous Absences and Formative Losses

Marianne Aimee Le Nabat
Collective Action

Joseph Lemelin
Nature's Form in Aristotle: An Essay on the Artificial and the Natural

Roxanne Magee
On Conceptualism - An Inquiry into Language and Thought

Luis Recoder
ZWANGSANALYSE: Adorno and the Compulsion of the Dialectic

Mark Thorsby
Intersubjectivity & Moral Failure

Maxwell Tremblay
Frantz Fanon's Philosophy of Race: Self, World, and Revolution

Yi Wu
The Sea and the Mirror: Essayings in De-territorialization and Mimesis

2017

Carlo Alvaro
Veganism As A Virtue

Lawrence Berger
Dasein as Attention: The Metaphysics of the Effort of Presence

Alexis Dianda
The Depths of Experience: William James after the Linguistic Turn

Daniel Fernandez
The Amoralist and the Internalism-Externalism Debate

Jordi Graupera
Metaphysics of Neutrality in Contemporary Liberalism

Krista Johansson
THUS SPOKE THE BODY: The Problem of Affirmation in Nietzsche's Philosophy

Daniel Vicente Jove Rosales
The Bequest of Language: Aspects of Inheritance in Stanley Cavell

David Kaye
The Philosopher and the Art of Holy Lying: Nietzsche on Truth, Deception, and Modernity

Krystal Dawn Kreye
On Counterrevolution

Scott Shushan
On Agency as Responsibility

Kevin Alistair Temple
ANSWERING DREYFUS’S CHALLENGE: Toward a Theory of Concepts Without Intellectualism

Mark Robrecht Theunissen
Rationality, Naturalism and Critique in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Alina Vaisfeld
Madness as a Problem of Transcendence: A phenomenological study of hallucinations and delusions

William Walsh
It Goes Without Saying: Derrida, Freud, and the "Fort/Da" of Language