Recent Dissertations

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Below is a sample of dissertation projects that have been completed in the Committee on Social Thought in recent years:

Paul Cato, “‘More Like a Fire, Like the Wind’”: James Baldwin and the Political Philosophy of Active Love” (2024)

Jue Hou, “The Life of the Flesh: Transwar Japan and the Crisis of Sensibility” (2024)

Amy Levine, “Anxiety and the Practical Point of View” (2024)

Bellamy Mitchell, “A Poetics of Apology” (2024)

Uday Arun Jain, "From Abolishing Untouchability to a Philosophy of Liberatory Education: W.E.B. Du Bois and B.R. Ambedkar in Dialogue" (2023)

Rikkert Peters, "Wonder in Greek and Roman Philosophy" (2023)

Antoine Pageau-St-Hilaire, "A German Second Sailing: Dialogical Platonism after Heidegger" (2023)

Andrea Ray, "Reasoning Over Time: Hegel’s Critique of Spinoza and the Possibilities of History" (2023)

Joshua Trubowitz, "Spontaneous Activity and Truthfulness in Aristotle's Theory of Perception" (2023)

Luke Foster, "Excellence for the Democratic Age: Liberal Education and the Mixed Regime" (2022)

Mat Messerschmidt, "The Guiding Thread of Modernity: Nietzsche's Death of God as a Physiological Event" (2022)

Elga Johanna Mick Clausen, "Is War a World Apart? "Necessity" in Walzer, Thucydides and Hobbes" (2022)

Douglas Williams, "The Comic Critique of Philosophy: Aristophanes, Plato, and the Bios Theōrētikos" (2022)

Michail Vlasopoulos, "The Beginning of the End of Matter: Three Moments in the History of an Idea, 1547-1713" (2022)

Robert Stone, "Four Fallacies: Thucydides on the Challenges of Democratic Decision-Making" (2022)

David Molina, "Kira Muratova: Epistemology of Self-Knowledge on the Cinema Screen" (2022)

Josef Majernik, "The Erziehung of the Human Soul: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen" (2022)

Austin Walker, "An Alexandrian Hermeneutic, or Theology in a Political Mode: A Study of John Henry Newman's Political Philosophy" (2022)

Noah Chafets, "The Good and Its Guises: Desire and Motivation in Plato's Gorgias and Republic" (2021)

Shana Crandell, "Action and the Actuality of Reason: A Study of Hegel's Idea of the Good" (2021)

Julia Mueller, "The Intelligence of Attention" (2021)

Chenxin Jiang, "An Ethics of Transition Through Translation" (2021)

William Wood, "Nietzsche's Argument for the Philosophical Life: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil" (2021)

Daniel Watling, "The Deepest Desire: Philosophy and Islam in The Book of Ibn Tūmart" (2021)

Danielle Charette, "David Hume's Imperfect Commonwealth" (2021)

Elena Comay del Junco, "Aristotle on Comparison" (2020)

Skomantas Pocius, "On Truthfulness: An Examination of Bernard Williams' Virtues of Truth" (2020)

Ben Jeffery, "An Image on Water: A Reading of Shakespeare's The Tempest" (2020)

Eliza Starbuck Little, "The Self Exhibition of Reason: Hegel on Intuition and Logical Content" (2020)

Lin Atnip, "From Tragic Form to Apocalyptic Reality in Four American Works: Toward an Epistemological Theory and Practice of Reading" (2019)

David Gutherz, "Towards the People: The Search for Subjugated Knowledges in Post-Fascist Italy" (2019)

Joseph Simmons, "Irenic Modernism: The Early Work of David Jones and W. H. Auden" (2019)

Konrad Weeda, "Imagined Languages and Forms of Life: Horace Reads Virgil"  (2019)

Anastasia Artemyev Berg, "Freedom, Feeling and Character: The Unity of Reason and Sensibility in Kant’s Practical Philosophy" (2017)

Brian Bitar, "Hobbes's Conception of Desire for Power" (2017)

Tamar Mayer, "Consequences of Drawing: Self and History in Jacques-Louis David’s Preparatory Practices" (2017)

Jon Baskin, "Different Therapies: David Foster Wallace's Philosophical Fiction" (2016)

Robert Abbott, "Explorations in Elegiac Space: Schiller, Nietzsche, Rilke" (2015)

Jeremy Bell, "Elizabeth Anscombe’s Wittgensteinian Third Way in Philosophy of Mind: A Thomist Critique" (2015)

Tobias Joho, "Language, Necessity, and Human Nature in Thucydides’ History" (2015)

Alexander Orwin, "Caught between City, Empire, and Religion: Alfarabi’s Concept of the Umma" (2015)

Michael Thomas, "Speculation and Civilization in the Social Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead" (2015)

Gregory Freeman, "Rousseau’s Natural Man: Emile and Politics" (2014)

David Matthew Hayes, "Modes of Valuation in Early Greek Poetry" (2014)

Erin Dana Leib, "God in the Years of Fury: Theodicy and Anti-Theodicy in the Holocaust Writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira" (2014)

James McCormick, "Towards an Ethical Literature: Character Narration and Extended Subjectivity in the Work of Robert Musil" (2014)

Oded Schechter, "Existence and Temporality in Spinoza" (2014)

Anton Barba-Kay, "Intelligence Incarnate: The Logic of Recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit" (2013)

Cynthia Rutz, "King Lear and its Folktale Analogues" (2013)

Jonathan Thakkar, "Can There be Philosopher-Kings in a Liberal Polity? A Reinterpretation and Reappropriation of the Ideal Theory in Plato’s Republic" (2013)

Theodor Dunkelgrün, "The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Confluence of Textual Traditions in the Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568-1573)" (2012)

Julien Appignani, "Dostoevsky and Suicide: A Study of the Major Characters" (2012)

Michael Subialka, "The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Pirandello, Schopenhauer, and the Transformation of the European Social Imaginary" (2012)

David Wollenberg, "Desire and Democracy: Spinoza and the Politics of Affect" (2012)

Thomas Bartscherer, "The Ancient Quarrel Unsettled: Plato and the Erotics of Tragic Poetry" (2011)

Justin David Evans, "Stubborn Against the Fact: Literary Ideals, Philosophy and Criticism" (2011)

Carl Eugene Findley III, "Perfecting Adam: The Perils of Innocence in the Modern Novel" (2011)

William Junker, "Heroic Action and Erotic Desire in Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare" (2011)

Katherine Lisa Kretler, "One Man Show: Poiesis and Genesis in the Iliad and Odyssey" (2011)

Peter Brickey Lequire, "Political Theology in Eric Voegelin's Philosophy of History" (2011)