Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2022, English

While Iris Murdoch scholars tend to focus pointedly on her moral quest for goodness, I plan to demonstrate that appreciating her unique brand of metaphysics is not possible without also deciphering her lesser-analyzed philosophy of evil. In “Against Dryness” (1961) Murdoch claims that modern literature “contains so few convincing pictures of evil” and that our inability to “imagine evil” is a consequence of our post-war perception of humanity, which she believed was far too optimistic given the human atrocities committed in the twentieth century. We are thus left with a dangerous fantasy that humans are “totally free and responsible, knowing everything we need to know for the important purposes of life,” which is a dry view because it fails to consider that humans are complex, contingent, and morally muddled. I will show how Murdoch's problem of dryness exists in today's pervasive social media practice of “cancel culture” which, like a dry novel, also paints an overly optimistic view of human nature and naively assumes that humans can readily choose acts of good over evil. I will do so by analyzing Murdoch's evil enchanters—particularly a chillingly demonic scene in The Flight From The Enchanter (1956) that involves a dry interpretation of the pornographic photograph surreptitiously taken of Rosa Keepe in which Calvin Blick exclaims: ‘This is my eye' . . . ‘This is the truthful eye that sees and remembers. The lens of my camera.' Just as Calvin's evil eye judges Rosa within the rigid confines of one snapshot in time, those who participate in cancel culture utilize similar reductive tactics to determine the moral value of a person based upon a sole photo, text, or event and purposefully do not make any space to consider the entire—invariably muddled, flawed, and complex— picture of the life of the individual they contemptuously excoriate and seek to cancel. The solutions to dryness that Murdoch's philosophy intimates are twofold: on the moral (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Fine David (Advisor) Subjects: Educational Theory; Literature; Social Research

MA, Kent State University, 2012, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Philosophy

This thesis reveals that Nietzsche is primarily a biological determinist, and although Nietzsche uses “freedom” terminology throughout his corpus, Nietzsche's revisionary conception of “freedom” not only accommodates his determinism, it requires it. The thesis begins by detailing Nietzsche's unique naturalistic approach — his “Hermeneutics of Suspicion” — which states that all conscious phenomena (i.e. actions, beliefs, morality) are derivatives of underlying physiological forces that we are neither aware of nor able to control. Next, it outlines how Nietzsche's hermeneutical approach undercuts the three descriptive components that are necessary for traditional notions of morality to exist — namely: free will, a stable/transparent “self,” and an essentially similar human “nature.” In doing so, the thesis demonstrates that traditional notions of “freedom” are illusory and turns its attention to the revisionary type of “freedom” Nietzsche actually affirms. Ironically, Nietzsche's notion of “freedom” actually rests upon his biological determinism because, according to Nietzsche, freedom is an ascent to fate — amor fati! Freedom is possible only for the rare higher types who are capable of overcoming the constraints and guilt imposed on them by traditional morality to fully express their unique biological and psychological dispositions. As such, Nietzsche's life task is to alert the nascent higher types to the real genealogy of values in order to free them from the impositions of morality, thereby clearing a path for their ascent to greatness.

Committee: Gene Pendleton (Advisor); David Odell-Scott (Committee Member); Linda Williams (Committee Member); Jennifer Larson (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy