Browsing by Subject "metaphysics"

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    Demarcation and Definition: The Metaphysics of Projects and Their Management Considered
    (2020-05) Tebbitt, Brian
    The philosophy of project management is largely uncharted territory. Although the possibility of it being a distinct area of inquiry has been suggested before now, it has not yet formally taken shape as such. Several years ago, discussions were had among academicians and professionals within project management circles regarding the relevance and applicability of philosophy to their craft, but philosophers themselves have yet to weigh in on any of it. Taking the proposal of J. Davidson Frame in his paper “Philosophy of Project Management: Lessons From the Philosophy of Science” as a starting point, I have proceeded into the current void to consider questions of project ontology and demarcation, present a novel theory of projects (Propositional Theory), and analyze common reasons for project failure. Beyond my own theorizing, my aim is to clear ground, as it were, to accommodate and encourage further debate in the interest of developing the philosophy of project management into a new area of applied philosophy.
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    Res Oralis: Mouths of Philosophy
    (2018-05) Gyenge, Andrea
    This dissertation returns to Jacques Derrida’s 1975 essay, “Economimesis,” to rethink the place of the mouth in modern philosophy. In contrast to existing scholarship, which links the mouth to the corporeal challenge of the body (either as a symbol for the feminine or the vessel for the voice), my research proposes that the mouth is fundamental to the legacy of humanism in continental thought. Retrieving Derrida’s early interest in the mouth, my project argues that “Economimesis” situates the mouth as absolutely unique, which is to say, the revelation of Kantian aesthetics is that the mouth occupies a fundamentally different place in Western metaphysics, a place that is not subject to the logic of either anatomy or metaphoric substitution. In retrieving this insight, my dissertation argues that “Economimesis” delivers a rather devastating diagnosis—that the mouth is the accomplice of a humanist philosophy born of the logocentrism bolstered by Kant’s aesthetics, a legacy I trace from Kant to Marx to Freud to stake a claim for its extraordinary longevity. In tracking this trajectory, I argue that the mouth operates as the primary figure through which modern philosophy makes a claim about the ontology of the human, a being rendered distinct from the animal on the grounds of its capacity to take its own life as the object of its productive (i.e., aesthetic) work. Rather than concluding, however, that the mouth is irretrievable, I pursue the thread of ‘other’ mouths—mouths not subject to this logic— in the work of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Jean-Luc Nancy and Luce Irigaray in order to begin challenging the humanist oralities of Western metaphysics.