Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, Music

In 1980s Berlin, churches held a special position: while much social and political discussion was forbidden in public, pressing issues could be addressed openly within the church's walls. A March 1978 meeting between Bishop Albrecht Schonherr and Head of State Erich Honecker led to a tentative rapprochement: in exchange for official political neutrality, people in church spaces were allowed to express themselves freely, and religious content could not be forbidden. Using this new autonomy, churches emerged as sites in which multiple ideologies could be engaged simultaneously, public zones established within private spaces. In doing so, they entered into a decades-long debate over ideas of publicity, privacy, and how a church should sound. Each of the many groups that used a church space – including political activists, artists, musicians, hippies, and punks – had its own desires, its own demands on the space, and its own beliefs about the meaning of that space. When these diverse needs collided, the negotiation between divergent views brought new and profound meanings to the social space of the church. I investigate this negotiation as it was manifested in three particular East Berlin churches – the Samariterkirche, in Friedrichshain, the Erloserkirche, in Lichtenberg, and the Zionskirche, in Prenzlauer Berg – and the ways in which people within those churches engaged in public action through sound. I also examine the sometimes tense interplay between the subcultural groups involved in the debate, through the increasingly heterogeneous sonic world of the East German Church. In these churches, sound, broadly conceived, became a signifier of pluralism and of political action. The growing heterogeneity of sounds in East Berlin churches emerged in parallel with diverse new social movements. I use a combination of archival and ethnographic research to examine two complementary case studies. The “Blues-Mass” genre, performed at the Samariterkirche and Erloserkirch (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ryan Skinner (Advisor); Danielle Fosler-Lussier (Advisor); Dorothy Noyes (Committee Member) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Music; Religion

MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Philosophy

My project is to establish a secularized concept of evil by filtering F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy through that of Martin Heidegger. Schelling's philosophy is essential to my project, because he seeks to claim a positive ontological status for evil, as do I. Schelling's evil, despite its religious context, is not mired in concepts of malformation, or even original sin, as is the evil of his predecessors. I offer Aristotle and Immanuel Kant as Schelling's key secular predecessors, in whose philosophies we find the beginnings of Schelling's free-will theodicy. Similarly, Schelling stands apart from modern theodicy—that is, from G.W. Leibniz, who coined the term “theodicy”—in three key ways: Schelling focuses on human beings, rather than on God; he embraces nature, rather than seeking to overcome it, which requires that he also embrace chaos; and he insists that evil has a positive ontological status, rather than a negative one. These departures show the influence of both Kant and Aristotle on Schelling's conception of evil. Over the course of this project, we will find that when we uncover evil's positive ontology and lay bare its actualization by humans, we ground an approach to evil suited to the political necessities of the twenty-first century. That is, we see that a proper philosophical understanding of evil necessarily calls us to a political address of the same. What the evils of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shown us, especially, is that a stronger, positive conception of evil enables us to assign accountability more effectively to those who commit evil acts. Hence, crafting a positive conception of evil outside of a theological framework will necessitate a moral framework. To that end, I engage the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt in order to make clear the implications of an ontologically positive evil and draw conclusions regarding the best concept of evil for a contemporary context. My view is that the best concept of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Gina Zavota PhD (Advisor); Kim Garchar PhD (Committee Member); Michael Byron PhD (Committee Member); Tammy Clewell PhD (Other) Subjects: Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Studies and Public Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2014, Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs

As Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out, a work of art allows us to explore our sense for meaning in the world. It not only allows us to translate our perceptions, but it allows our perceptions to speak to us through what he called a “respiration in being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). In this process of respiration, artists and artful public administrators alike are inspired by what they see, and expire that which is seen (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). This research suggests that what Merleau-Ponty described is an element of the aesthetic experience that enables a person to explore the world and what it means to be in it. After Dwight Waldo argued that all ways of knowing are value laden in the field of public administration, he left the field without a prescribed way to know, and this is a problem, given that public administrators are often required to act while in a crisis. If public administrators lack a form of inquiry to understand the world, then how are they to act? This dissertation asks whether administrators, in fact, base their administrative discretion on aesthetic judgment and what they find pleasing or displeasing, their taste (Kant, 2001), to discern what to do and which type of understanding to employ (Arendt, 1992; Hummel, 2006; Stivers, 2011). Through a set of phenomenological interviews the dissertation attempts to access, or pull on the understanding(s) of artists, artful administrators, and hybrids, to better understand administrative discretion by examining the aesthetic experience more deeply and hopefully contribute to how we think about the role of the expert in public administration.

Committee: Camilla Stivers Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Nicholas Zingale Ph.D. (Committee Member); Robert Zinke Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; Philosophy; Public Administration

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2012, Philosophy

My thesis explicates Hannah Arendt's Socratic notion of thinking, the adversarial dialogue one has with oneself that enables one to take moral account of past and future actions. Plato's Socrates and Nazi officer Adolph Eichmann are utilized by Arendt as paradigmatic cases of thinking and non-thinking, respectively. My concern is how the thinking activity may become corrupt or even spoiled, whereby one is rendered genuinely incapable of thought, and hence, of moral action. I suspect such spoiling, if possible, could occur under one or both of the following conditions: (a) habituated refusal to engage in critical self-reflection; or (b) never developing the conceptual tools and language to adequately reflect on one's moral self. I show that if we interpret Arendt's claim that Eichmann was “never” capable of thinking to be absolute, in accordance with condition (b), then Arendt cannot justifiably levy moral and legal responsibility upon a man who helped send hundreds of thousands of Jews to their murderous death. However, if we interpret Eichmann's failure to think as the product of condition (a), it suggests that at some point in his past Eichmann was capable of thought, and hence, moral action. Under such a reading, Arendt can have her cake and eat it too.

Committee: Benjamin Grazzini PhD (Committee Chair); Renee Heberle PhD (Committee Member); Charles Blatz PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethics; Modern History; Peace Studies; Philosophy; Political Science; Social Psychology; Sociology

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2009, Philosophy

Working primarily with Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy, I critique aspects of contemporary political thought with regard to the public, the private and the nature of the individual. I challenge the vision of the public and private spheres as being necessarily divided, as well as the assumption of the family into the private realm. Using Nancy, I develop a way of thinking about plurality, the self and our interactions with the political from a more holistic stance.

Committee: Benjamin Pryor PhD (Committee Chair); Renee Heberle PhD (Committee Member); Madeline Muntersbjorn PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Families and Family Life; Philosophy; Womens Studies

BA, Oberlin College, 2012, Politics

In the first section, I begin with an account of action within the context of the vita activa as laid out by Arendt in The Human Condition. I then proceed to identify some of the more perplexing features of her account, and suggest that they are confounding enough to throw the coherency of what Arendt is saying into question. Taking my cue from Hanna Pitkin, I then argue that we can understand action as activity informed by thinking, by drawing upon Arendt's posthumously published work The Life of the Mind. This account, however, though illuminating with regard to some aspects of political action, will be shown to possess serious deficiencies in others. Thus, I will proceed in section two to explicate Heidegger's conception of "worldhood," and will demonstrate that Arendt's conception of "the world of appearances" in The Life of the Mind is essentially derivative of this account. I will then go on in section three to show that Arendt's conception of the "world" in The Human Condition is fundamentally a critique of Heidegger's account, and that far from being derivative, Arendt actually exposes major deficiencies in Heidegger's notion of worldhood. I will then conclude by giving an account of action as taking responsibility for the world, with the world understood as a space for action and freedom.

Committee: Harlan Wilson PhD (Advisor); Sonia Kruks PhD (Advisor) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2013, Philosophy

In this essay, I respond critically to two social phenomena: the unreflective repetition of values and the problem of a democracy in name only. After revealing the stakes of the project through an introduction to the three main thinkers and some central contemporary issues that are particularly illustrative of the focal problems, I devote the three middle chapters to an examination of the public space and indirect communication as found in the work of, respectively, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hannah Arendt, and Søren Kierkegaard. I argue that when taken in concert, these three figures present a cogent account of how people ought to cultivate an ethos of critique or resistance, while nonetheless acknowledging that political participation is itself a mode of form-giving, or stabilization of social relations. The delicate balance between form-giving and critical resistance becomes central to the project, as does the relationship between the public space (Castoriadis and Arendt) and indirect communication (Kierkegaard). Political action is ultimately an educative process that fuels the productive questioning of values and the undermining of foundational principles, two essential aspects of genuine democracy and active, lucid self-creation.

Committee: Benjamin Grazzini (Advisor); Madeline Muntersbjorn (Committee Member); Ammon Allred (Committee Member); James Campbell (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy