Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Metaphysics – Fiction'
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1
Smeriglio, Kristina. "Hallowed Be Thy Fall." NSUWorks, 2015. http://nsuworks.nova.edu/writing_etd/35.
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All Priella wanted was to find love. She roamed the fields of the Garden of Earthly Delights, day by day, in the hopes of finally attaining it. But, it wasn't that simple. In the midst of an existential crisis, unable to understand her difficulty in relating to others and achieving happiness, Priella meets the Archangel Michael who offers her a chance at salvation. Venturing into the unknown, Priella is forced to face the distorted ways of thinking that kept her hostage.
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Muller, Cathleen. "Harry Potter and the Rescue from Realism: A Novel Defense of Anti-Realism about Fictional Objects." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1330719422.
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Mfune, Damazio Laston. "My other - my self: post-Cartesian ontological possibilities in the fiction of J M Coetzee." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002289.
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The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics.
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Fontaine, Matthieu. "Argumentation et engagement ontologique de l’acte intentionnel : Pour une réflexion critique sur l’identité dans les logiques intentionnelles explicites." Thesis, Lille 3, 2013. http://www.theses.fr/2013LIL30025/document.
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L'intentionalité est la faculté qu'a l'esprit humain de se diriger vers des objets de toutes sortes. On la capture linguistiquement à travers l'usage de verbes comme "savoir", "croire", "craindre", "espérer". Les énoncés intentionnels comme "Jean croit que Nosferatu est un vampire" ou "Oedipe aime Jocaste" défient les lois de la logique classique, remettant en cause la validité de principes logiques tels que la généralisation existentielle ou encore la substitution des identiques. Je propose dans ma thèse une analyse fondée sur les logiques intentionnelles explicites, des logiques où le langage est enrichi au moyen d'opérateurs qui expriment explicitement l'intentionalité. Des aspects originaux de la signification des énoncés intentionnels sont saisis au coeur des pratiques argumentatives, dans le contexte de la logique dialogique notamment. S'intéressant plus spécifiquement au cas de la fictionalité, paradigme où se mêlent naturellement considérations logiques, linguistiques et métaphysiques, je défends une théorie artefactuelle dans laquelle on définit des critères d'existence et d'identité pour les identités fictionnelles littéraires au moyen de la notion de relation de dépendance ontologique. La notion de dépendance ontologique est toutefois sujette à de graves difficultés que l'on repasse ici dans le contexte d'une sémantique modale-Temporelle, défendant alors une approche novatrice de la dimension artefactuelle des fictions. In fine, on propose une combinaison de la théorie artefactuelle à une sémantique pour l'opérateur de fictionalité qui permet l'articulation entre différents points de vue sur la fiction, les points de vue interne et externe notammentIntentionality is that faculty of human mind whereby it is directed towards objects of all kinds. It is recorded linguistically in verbs such as "to know", "to believe", "to fear", "to hope". Intentional statements such as "John thinks that Nosferatu is a vampire" or "Oedipus loves Jocasta" challenge classical logical laws such as existential generalization or substitution of identical. I propose here an analysis grounded on explicit intentional logics, i. e. logics in which languages are enriched by means of specific operators expressing intentionality. Some original aspects of the meanings of intentional statements are grasped within argumentative practices, more specifically in the context of dialogical logic. I focus more specifically on fictionality, a paradigm in which logical, linguistic and metaphysical considerations are naturally embedded. I defend an artifactual theory in which existence and identity criteria for fictional entities are defined by means of the notion of ontological dependence relation. That notion faces several difficulties overcome here in a modal-Temporal semantics in which an innovating approach to the artifactual diemnsion of fiction is defended. Ultimately, a combination of that theory to a semantic for the fictionality operator is suggested. This enable us to articulate external and internal viewpoints on fictionality
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Wynn, Freda A. "Alternative realities/The multiverse a metaphysical conundrum /." unrestricted, 2005. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-11142005-155256/.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2005.Title from title screen. Kay Beck, committee chair; Edward J. Friedman, Kathryn H. Fuller, committee members. Electronic text (124 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 17, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-124).
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Sanyal, Sudipto. "An Uncertain Poetics of the Intoxicated Narrative: Drugs, Detection, Denouement." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1367932599.
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袁洪庚 and Honggeng Yuan. "From conventional to experimental: the makingof Chinese metaphysical detective fiction." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1999. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B43894422.
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Yuan, Honggeng. "From conventional to experimental : the making of Chinese metaphysical detective fiction /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1999. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B21556398.
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Wynn, Freda A. "Alternative Realities/The Multiverse: A Metaphysical Conundrum." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2006. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/communication_theses/4.
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Films of every era reflect the concerns and fears of Western society. The acceleration of technology, the loss of a concrete world, the uneasy relationship with humans and ever increasing complex machines are inducing a fear of losing the ability to discern reality. The reality of ideas from science and the world around are woven into the narratives that we use to explain life.The films we watch reflect our hopes and fears and as the fears increase so do films with a shared theme of alternative realities. To know reality and search for the true Self is the job of the hero and the protagonist in recent alternative reality films.
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Giddens, Thomas Philip. "Comics, crime, and the moral self : an interdisciplinary study of criminal identity." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/3622.
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An ethical understanding of responsibility should entail a richly qualitative comprehension of the links between embodied, unique individuals and their lived realities of behaviour. Criminal responsibility theory broadly adheres to ‘rational choice’ models of the moral self which subsume individuals’ emotionally embodied dimensions under the general direction of their rational will and abstracts their behaviour from corporeal reality. Linking individuals with their behaviour based only on such understandings of ‘rational choice’ and abstract descriptions of behaviour overlooks the phenomenological dimensions of that behaviour and thus its moral significance as a lived experience. To overcome this ethical shortcoming, engagement with the aesthetic as an alternative discourse can help articulate the ‘excessive’ nature of lived reality and its relationship with ‘orthodox’ knowledge; fittingly, the comics form involves interaction of rational, non-rational, linguistic, and non-linguistic dimensions, modelling the limits of conceptual thought in relation to complex reality. Rational choice is predicated upon a split between a contextually embedded self and an abstractly autonomous self. Analysis of the graphic novel Watchmen contends that prioritisation of rational autonomy over sensual experience is symptomatic of a ‘rational surface’ that turns away from the indeterminate ‘chaos’ of complex reality (the unstructured universe), instead maintaining the power of rational and linguistic concepts to order the world. This ‘rational surface’ is maintained by masking that which threatens its stability: the chaos of the infinite difference of living individuals. These epistemological foundations are reconfigured, via Watchmen, enabling engagement beyond the ‘rational surface’ by accepting the generative potential of this living chaos and calling for models of criminal identity that are ‘restless’, acknowledging the unique, shifting nature of individuals, and not tending towards ‘complete’ or stable concepts of the self-as-responsible. As part of the aesthetic methodology of this reconfiguration, a radical extension of legal theory’s analytical canon is developed.
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Graziani, Lorenzo. "Un groviglio di mondi. Studio sul pluralismo fisico, metafisico e letterario postmoderno." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Trento, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/11572/260546.
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The main goal of this PhD dissertation is to explore the relation between postmodern poetics and some features of other theories developed at the same time in various areas of knowledge – mainly metaphysics, physics and sociology. If we can say that the modern paradigm was born with the question of how a multiplicity of different points of view could coexist, the postmodern paradigm seems to arise with the awareness that a systematic legitimation of differences cannot be based on a sole foundation that leads to a complete inclusion. For this reason, we argue that the concept of possible world is not only a useful heuristic metaphor adopted in different areas of the artistic and scientific postmodern culture, but it can put in constructive conversation different areas of knowledge which are usually thought to be more isolated and refractory to mutual influence than they actually are. Precisely because of the diverse usages and meanings that the term ‘world’ acquires in different contexts, the ontological commitment toward possible worlds varies significantly. They can be godly concepts, fictional scenarios, real sums of individuals that are isolated from each other, or ideal set of objects that are associated with different and mutually exclusive frames of reference and cultural coordinates. To shed a light on these matters is the main goal of the first book, entitled "What is a possible world?". The second book, entitled "Entangled worlds: the postmodernist literature", is committed to explore the topology of the possible worlds projected by postmodernist texts; in fact, the paradoxical topology that emerges from these texts appears to be inherently connected with a vast range of issues concerning our world.
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Hall, J. "A metaphysical country : American pragmatist fictions in Barth, Pynchon, and Reed." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.599863.
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The aim of this thesis is to reread the work of three US writers, whose novels have long been central to the postmodern canon - John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed - in relation to philosophical pragmatism. The scepticism expressed in their parodic reworkings of everything from mythology, to history, to philosophy and literature will be resituated alongside an antifoundational philosophy that Cornel West has described as ‘an attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment’. In each chapter I will be elucidating connections that exist between these writers and pragmatist philosophers, in particular William James. From this platform I will be exploring how philosophical pragmatism has informed the attempts made by these writers to ‘explain America to itself’, attempts which in each case have been critical of the US, while also perpetuating some of its exceptionalist claims. Ultimately, I will be suggesting that while these postmodern novelists are relentlessly anxious about the failure of representation and the intractability of epistemological problems, this does not lead them into silence. Rather, they energetically perform the evasion of epistemology that West attributes to pragmatism, an evasion in which metaphysics and epistemology are partially replaced by a national history that recognizes itself as fictional. The chapter on Barth will focus on his attempts to quarantine fiction from the world, while recognizing, and to an extent celebrating, the mutual infection of story and history. The chapter on Pynchon will examine the sense of inevitability in his novels about inhabiting structures such as science, religion, or nation, with a corresponding hope that there will be room enough for humans to make themselves at home within such structures. The chapter on Reed will look at his efforts at syncretism, refashioning US history using African religion and mythology.
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Graziani, Lorenzo. "Un groviglio di mondi. Studio sul pluralismo fisico, metafisico e letterario postmoderno." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Trento, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/11572/260546.
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The main goal of this PhD dissertation is to explore the relation between postmodern poetics and some features of other theories developed at the same time in various areas of knowledge – mainly metaphysics, physics and sociology. If we can say that the modern paradigm was born with the question of how a multiplicity of different points of view could coexist, the postmodern paradigm seems to arise with the awareness that a systematic legitimation of differences cannot be based on a sole foundation that leads to a complete inclusion. For this reason, we argue that the concept of possible world is not only a useful heuristic metaphor adopted in different areas of the artistic and scientific postmodern culture, but it can put in constructive conversation different areas of knowledge which are usually thought to be more isolated and refractory to mutual influence than they actually are. Precisely because of the diverse usages and meanings that the term ‘world’ acquires in different contexts, the ontological commitment toward possible worlds varies significantly. They can be godly concepts, fictional scenarios, real sums of individuals that are isolated from each other, or ideal set of objects that are associated with different and mutually exclusive frames of reference and cultural coordinates. To shed a light on these matters is the main goal of the first book, entitled "What is a possible world?". The second book, entitled "Entangled worlds: the postmodernist literature", is committed to explore the topology of the possible worlds projected by postmodernist texts; in fact, the paradoxical topology that emerges from these texts appears to be inherently connected with a vast range of issues concerning our world.
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Döring, Lutz. "Erweckung zum Tod : eine kritische Untersuchung zu Funktionsweise, Ideologie und Metaphysik der Horror- und Science-Fiction-Filme Alien 1-4 /." Würzburg : Königshausen und Neumann, 2006. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2756348&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Döring, Lutz. "Erweckung zum Tod eine kritische Untersuchung zu Funktionsweise, Ideologie und Metaphysik der Horror- und Science-Fiction-Filme Alien 1-4." Würzburg Königshausen und Neumann, 2005. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2756348&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Pei, Kong-ngai. "Fictional characters and their names a defense of the fact theory /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2007. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/b4020389x.
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Pei, Kong-ngai, and 貝剛毅. "Fictional characters and their names: a defense of the fact theory." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2007. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B4020389X.
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Connelly, Kelly C. "From Poe to Auster: Literary Experimentation in the Detective Story Genre." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2009. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/41668.
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EnglishPh.D.
Two dominating lines of criticism regarding the detective novel have perpetuated the misconception that detective fiction before the 1960s was a static and monolithic form unworthy of critical study. First, critics of the traditional detective story have argued that the formulaic nature of the genre is antithetical to innovation and leaves no room for creative exploration. Second, critics of the postmodern detective novel have argued that the first literary experiments with the genre began only with post-World War II authors such as Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Paul Auster. What both sets of critics fail to acknowledge is that the detective fiction genre always has been the locus of a dialectic between formulaic plotting and literary experimentation. In this dissertation, I will examine how each generation of detective story authors has engaged in literary innovation to refresh and renew what has been mistakenly labeled as a sterile and static popular genre.
Temple University--Theses
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Ikonomakis, Roula. "Post-war British fiction as "metaphysical ethnography" : gods, godgames and goodness in John Fowle's "The Magus" and Iris Murdoch's "The sea, the sea /." [S.l. : s.n], 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40143287n.
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Lee, Thomas M. ""At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied" : the prose fictional metaphysics of W. G. Sebald." Thesis, 2012. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/525120.
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This thesis examines writing as a means of persuasion through which one might explore the grounds and scope of perception. Its primary focus is W. G. Sebald’s four works of prose fiction, Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants and Austerlitz. I interpret Sebald as unique among contemporary writers of fiction in his sustained interest in the metaphysics of perception, in particular the role played by suggestive connections, and the kind of thinking that takes place in writing, as writing, while one writes. For Sebald, writing (both as material and as a representational device) and reading are crucial parts of perceptual experience, not simply from the perspective of a knowing, human subject, but in terms of the various kinds of agencies distributed throughout the world. I argue that Sebald’s prose fiction accounts for a wide range of perceptual experiences, including perspectives of the human and non-human, living and non-living, remembered, documented, dreamt and imagined. In his work we witness how these generically different experiences continually affect and participate in the nature of each other. Sebald’s attention to the complexity of perceptual experience, along with his stylistic elegance and formal innovativeness, means that his work offers valuable insight into the question that haunts any literary enterprise: what is the world like from another perspective? And to what extent is a perspective informed by the multiple perspectives it necessarily obscures? Sebald provides the reader with an account whereby specific perceptual detail and impersonal history at once interweave and retain their distinctness. I read Sebald alongside the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and recent critics and thinkers who have taken an interest in Whitehead’s work. For me, Whitehead offers a conceptual scaffold adequate to the richness, variability, obscurity and continual novelty of perceptual experience. In addition to Whitehead’s work, I recruit other contemporary thinkers and writers who, like Sebald, are preoccupied with imaginatively accounting for the various genres of thing that compose our world and instance worlds unto themselves. This predisposition methodologically and stylistically manifests in readings of modernity that emphasise poetic affect and poetic ix thinking as ways of accounting for experience and which are not limited by disciplinary exclusivity. Among the perhaps more implicit, though no less productive, propositions of this reading is a reassessment of the division between non-conscious and conscious perception. Invoking Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism”, I argue for a conception of consciousness that exemplifies aspects of non-conscious perceptual and cognitive processes, and, in an inverse but complementary fashion, for a more inclusive conception of the non-human world regarding its perceptual capacity. Sebald’s prose is the test case that serves as a limitation and medium, and which plays an active role in the tracing and establishment of these propositions. This thesis practises a kind of literary criticism that treats objects as implicated in the pervasive aspects of our experience. It proposes an interpretation of Sebald’s texts and, more generally, a reading methodology or theory that seeks to exemplify rather than judge the hypothetical worlds his texts establish.
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Brilmyer, Sarah Pearl. "The intimate pulse of reality : sciences of description in fiction and philosophy, 1870-1920." Thesis, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/31359.
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This dissertation tracks a series of literary interventions into scientific debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing how the realist novel generated new techniques of description in response to pressing philosophical problems about agency, materiality, and embodiment. In close conversation with developments in the sciences, writers such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner portrayed human agency as contiguous with rather than opposed to the pulsations of the physical world. The human, for these authors, was not a privileged or even an autonomous entity but a node in a web of interactive and co-constitutive materialities. Focused on works of English fiction published between 1870-1920, I argue that the historical convergence of a British materialist science and a vitalistic Continental natural philosophy led to the rise of a dynamic realism attentive to material forces productive of “character.” Through the literary figure of character and the novelistic practice of description, I show, turn-of-the-century realists explored what it meant to be an embodied subject, how qualities in organisms emerge and develop, and the relationship between nature and culture more broadly.
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Rieske, Tegan Echo. "Alzheimer's Disease Narratives and the Myth of Human Being." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3183.
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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The ‘loss of self’ trope is a pervasive shorthand for the prototypical process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the popular imagination. Turned into an effect of disease, the disappearance of the self accommodates a biomedical story of progressive deterioration and the further medicalization of AD, a process which has been storied as an organic pathology affecting the brain or, more recently, a matter of genetic calamity. This biomedical discourse of AD provides a generic framework for the disease and is reproduced in its illness narratives. The disappearance of self is a mythic element in AD narratives; it necessarily assumes the existence of a singular and coherent entity which, from the outside, can be counted as both belonging to and representing an individual person. The loss of self, as the rhetorical locus of AD narrative, limits the privatization of the experience and reinscribes cultural storylines---storylines about what it means to be a human person. The loss of self as it occurs in AD narratives functions most effectively in reasserting the presence of the human self, in contrast to an anonymous, inhuman nonself; as AD discourse details a loss of self, it necessarily follows that the thing which is lost (the self) always already existed. The private, narrative self of individual experience thus functions as proxy to a collective human identity predicated upon exceptionalism: an escape from nature and the conditions of the corporeal environment.