Browsing by Author "Crowell, Steven"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    A Phenomenological Critique of Irene McMullin's Formulation of Heideggerian Temporality
    (Rice University, 2019) Barton, Jason; Crowell, Steven
    This paper aims at differentiating Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology from Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological ethics on the experiential level of encountering otherness. In addition to drawing from each author’s seminal texts, I will contextualize the disagreement between Heidegger and Levinas to Irene McMullin’s Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations. McMullin, in her response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s criticism of Heidegger’s ontology, provides a formulation of Heideggerian temporality that markedly deviates from Heideggerian ontological commitments in Being and Time. I present and develop two deviations: (a) McMullin positions Dasein’s original encounter with the Other before the establishment of Dasein’s ontological structures (i.e., Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others) and (b) McMullin attributes Dasein’s inauthenticity to the Other’s limitation of Dasein’s temporalization of Being. I contend that both deviations correspond with Levinas’s phenomenology of temporality more than Heidegger’s phenomenology of temporality. It is through McMullin’s deviations, therefore, that distinctions can be drawn between Heidegger’s ontological articulation of Being-guilty, the call of conscience, Being-towards-death, and Angst on one hand and Levinas’s metaphysical articulation of conscience, shame, and death on the other.
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    Critical Theory, Normativity, and Catastrophe: A Critique of Amy Allen’s Metanormative Contextualism
    (Rice University, 2020-05) Rehman, Bilal; Crowell, Steven
    Critical theory is an approach to philosophical and cultural analysis that focuses on oppression and liberation. In this essay, I consider the prospect of moral-political progress in critical theory, focusing primarily on Amy Allen’s position of metanormative contextualism as described in her 2016 work, "The End of Progress." I first consider Allen’s arguments against Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action, and then explore how metanormative contextualism is rooted in the thought of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. Lastly, by showing how postcolonial studies reminds us of the deeply political stakes of critical theory, I argue that ideas about moral-political progress can be grounded in the urgent need to “avoid catastrophe.”
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    Estrangement and responsibility: Heidegger's account of selfhood
    (2008) Burch, Matthew I.; Crowell, Steven
    My dissertation examines Heidegger's phenomenology of estrangement and responsibility. I argue that one of the central issues of Being and Time is the possibility of an estranged individual's transformation into a responsible self. For Heidegger, each agent's original condition is one of estrangement—or a failure to be oneself—because socialization, although a necessary condition of agency, often encourages integration at the expense of self-determination. Estrangement thus involves being held at a distance from one's autonomy, and one can overcome this condition and become a self only by making the inward movement to ‘be-responsible’ or ‘resolute’. Pace Heidegger's critics, then, I show that resoluteness does not represent a bare valorization of the will but rather a way of life that involves, at the very least, satisfying the following four criteria: (1) delimiting the sphere of action for which I can be held accountable, (2) taking responsibility for my decisions and the standards in light of which I make them, (3) sustaining the commitments that are definitive of my identity and thereby preserving my integrity, and (4) carrying out my existence with an ethical regard towards the freedom of those upon whom my own capacity to act depends.
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    Selfhood, intersubjectivity, and the normativity of moral obligations
    (2009) Smith, William Hosmer; Crowell, Steven
    Contemporary analytic philosophers inspired by Kant's practical philosophy have recently attempted present a view of moral obligation that traces the normativity of morality back either to the agent's first-personal autonomy (Christine Korsgaard) or the agent's second-personal interaction with others (Stephen Darwall). In this dissertation, I draw these contributions into conversation with the phenomenological approaches of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas. The solution to the “analytic” problem of moral normativity, I contend, is a “Continental” account of selfhood and intersubjectivity found in phenomenology. The framework for my theory of moral obligation is a Heideggerian understanding of the self as “being-in-the-world,” one that is attuned to Levinasian moments (the experience of obligation in alterity) through a rehabilitation of Heidegger's notion of intersubjectivity as being-with ( Mitsein ). The result is a two-part account of the normativity of morality: the ground of morality itself is second-personal—rooted in the ethical demand intrinsic to other persons—while the ground for particular moral-obligations is first-personal—rooted in the subject's avowal or endorsement of certain ethical norms within a concrete historical situation. Moral obligations, I argue, are those standards to which I hold myself in light of the moral demand for respect I find in the experience of others.