2019 Senior Essays

Sannah Braun

Title: Biblical Purpose in Don Quixote

Abstract: Having purpose in one's life is a powerful thing. The story of Don Quixote is a testament to this fact. My thesis explores the idea of Don Quixote's purpose parallel to the Bible's definition of purpose, while comparing a few of the other character's motives to his.

Luke
Perez

Title: Reason, Ratio, Reductio

Abstract: Through both structure and content, it is evident that Kant is influenced by mathematics. Kant’s rhetoric relies on his understanding of ancient mathematicians. This paper specifically looks at infinity as an example of Kant’s reliance on mathematics. Kant’s idea of infinity comes from Newton who heavily relies on Euclid. Analyzing the connection between Kant and mathematics offers a new way to interpret Kant.

Title: Is Justice just difficult to understand?

Abstract: In the dialogue between Socrates, Hermogenes, and Cratylus on the correctness of names, we encounter some problems with certain kinds of names and their meanings. For example, the virtue of justice is an extension of the name just, “but the just itself is hard to understand. It seems that many people agree with one another about it up to a point, but beyond that they disagree” (Cratylus, 412d). It seems to be the case that when dealing with words of the intelligible realm, we have difficulty translating them into the visible realm. Looking at the Cratylus, Parmenides, Gorgias, and the Republic, focusing on the virtue justice, this paper will explore why it is, that words of this kind emit, or seemingly emit, more than one interpretation of meaning.

Title: Pens, Pies, Part to Wholes

Abstract: Part to whole relationships run rampant in western philosophers’ explorations. But how effective are they? This paper will observe different takes on the roles part to whole relationships play in the understanding of formidable topics such as history (Leo Tolstoy), the good (Plato), and geometry (Euclid). It also offers an alternative eastern view that could smooth over some of the cracks that these philosophers encounter when puzzling together their wholes (Lao Tzu).

Title: ‘The Way’ of Language

Ladies and Gentleman,
Seek your answers between the lines.
Let Lao Tzu govern your mind
Surely,
the Tao Te Ching will unwind.
Embark on the path of ‘The Way’
To observe its secrets, manifested mysteries,
concocted contradictions coming to agreement
and signs of names overflowing of ever-changing
essence.
Leave your world of certainty
enter certain ambiguity.
Ask yourself: What is ‘The Way’?

Title: Life: A Study in Learning, Education, and Friendship

Abstract: This paper will use the theoretical ideas of education, from Rousseau’s Emile and A Discourse on Equality and Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, to understand and explore the influences Pierre and Andrew in War and Peace and Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in Don Quixote have on each other.

Title: Ethics: Created or Discovered

Abstract: What is morality, its nature? Is it an objective thing out in the world waiting to be discovered? Or is it a subjective thing, created by preference and opinion? Something equatable to a science, seeking to discover moral truths, whose existence is testable and provable? Or completely subjective, depending on each situation? Metaethical foundations provide the scope for moral values, more specifically, what morality itself is. How do we come to the hold the ethics we use as the very means to establish what is to be considered moral, namely, what is to be considered right and wrong? And are these ethics an objective discovery or merely a necessary construction in order to universally implement what each individual should believe to be either right or wrong? The analysis will begin with the pre-socratics, focusing on Homer and Heraclitus, continue on to the socratics, investigating a range of Plato’s works, and will end with the moderns, zooming in on select texts from both Immanuel Kant and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Humor and Education: A Practical Model for Didactic Efficacy

Appendices

What ought to be the content of a Liberal Arts education? Who ought to be its target? and Why did the chicken cross the road? This dissertation will answer all this, and more! In this quadripartite thesis, the author will argue that the only effective Liberal Arts education is an integrated curriculum of significant works, that all of society needs to be taught, lest we all perish in the abject absurdity of relativism. The thesis is split between a demonstrative argument exploring the didactic efficacy of the phenomenon of ‘humor’ towards the dissertation’s thesis, and a brief series of appendices to the first half. The demonstrative portion of the dissertation takes the format of a faux-reconstruction of Aristotle’s lost second book of Poetics with a commentary by the fictional character Cide Hamete Benengeli from Don Quixote, with heavy annotations exploring the nature of signs, meaning, allusions. The appendices serve as a more formal approach to the same aims presented in the demonstrative portion, and will analyze concepts of truth, information, and error with a reliance on Kantian terminology and examples from Frege, Hegel, Plato, Dedekind, and others. Ultimately, a model for a Liberal Arts education is presented developed from the arguments herein.

Title: Paradise Perverted: Divine Creation vs. Human Fallibility

Title: Tom Jones is a Proverb

Abstract: By analyzing Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, we perceive the characters as demonstrating proverbs found in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, even though they don’t quote these proverbs. Considering all the definitions of the terms that have changed through time in these proverbs, we gain multiple perceptions of the proverbs and of the characters demonstrating them. We will analyze the evolution of words and their definitions through time and how they affect our understanding of proverbs found in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath and Shakespeare’s Sonnets and those portraying those proverbs.

Title: Difficult Dialogues; and How to be Judgy

What is dialectic, what is it good for, and what is required of each interlocutor in order to have a dialectical conversation? Using primarily Plato’s Philebus, we hope to answer these questions. In other words, what could the characteristics of Socrates way of conversing possibly have to do with difficult conversations to have had then, have now, and have in the future?

Title: Why Kant Can Konnect Mathematics to Experience

Abstract: Why do a priori synthetic judgements, such as mathematics, correlate to real world appearances/objects? In this thesis I will answer and attempt to defend Kant’s view of mathematics as a synthetic judgment and its correspondence to reality.