Browsing by Author "Crowell, Steven G."
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Item (De) Constructing the (Non)Being of God: A Trinitarian Critique of Postmodern A/Theology(1995) Keith Putt, B.; Nielsen, Niels C.; Kelber, Werner H.; Crowell, Steven G.Langdon Gilkey maintained in 1969 that theological language was in "ferment" over whether "God" could be expressed in language. He argued that "radical theology," specifically the kenotic christology in Altizer's "death of God" theology, best represented that ferment. Some twenty-five years later, in the postmodern context of the 199's, whether one can speak of God and, if so, how remain prominent issues for philosophers of religion and theologians. One of the most provocative contemporary approaches to these questions continues to focus on the "death of God." Mark Taylor's a/theology attempts to "do" theology after the divine demise by thinking the end of theology without ending theological thinking. Taylor's primary thesis, predicated upon his reading of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive philosophy, is that God gives way to the sacred and the sacred may be encountered only within the "divine milieu" of writing. God is dead, the self is dead, history has no structure, and language cannot be totalized in books; consequently, theology must be errant and textually disseminative. Unfortunately, Taylor's a/theology as a hermeneutic of the "death of God" fails to leave God's existence undecidable and also fails to address substantively the ethical implications of postmodernism. The radical hermeneutics of John Caputo offers a significant supplement to Taylor's thought and a critical reconstruction of alternative postmodern models for God. Caputo's "armed neutrality" concerning the being of God and his insistence on the inescapability of ethical obligation allow for a deconstruction of ontotheology and the reconstruction of a "biblical" paradigm of a suffering God. Caputo's focus on the ethico-religious dynamic of alterity and difference suggests a postmodern christology, since he believes that Jesus exemplifies the poetics of obligation that seeks to heal wounded flesh. Yet, scripture presents Jesus as the revelation of a suffering, heterophilic God. Contaminating Caputo's poetics of obligation with Jürgen Moltmann's theology of the crucified God results in the repetition of a "biblical" theopassional theology that accepts the undecidability inherent within history and language, but which, through fear and trembling, acknowledges that God loves alterity and difference and desires that human beings do also.Item Feminist interpretations of the home and the practice of dwelling(2012) Henderson, Summer; Crowell, Steven G.This thesis explores a resignification of the home in light of Heidegger's concept of dwelling. I begin by reviewing two opposing interpretations of the social and psychological dimensions of home: the traditional view, which sees the home as a site of comfort, refuge and centeredness, and the feminist view, which interprets the home as a site of objectification, difference and oppression. Seeking to cut through the debate, I develop an account of the home based on Heidegger's description of dwelling, which understands the home to be a manifestation of our dwelling practices. That is, the home reveals our way of being open, provisional, historical and communal. In addition to bringing this account to bear on the prior interpretations, I end the thesis with an argument against postmodern proposals of "homelessness" and explore the relationship between the home as a site of dwelling and our understanding of self.Item Listening to Each Other, Ourselves, and the World: A Study of Heidegger's Concepts of Discourse and Language(2012) Andrus, James Patrick; Crowell, Steven G.In this thesis, I argue two main points concerning the significance and development of Martin Heidegger's concepts of discourse and language. The first is that his concept of discourse, which for the Heidegger of Being and Time is the human practice of articulating meaning or intelligibility, has often been misunderstood as either (a) simply another name for natural languages, or (b) a wholly prelinguistic and precommunicative phenomenon. I attempt to find a middle way between these two interpretations that, on my view, is truer to the text, and argue that although discourse does sometimes manifest itself prelinguistically, it is also an essentially communicative phenomenon. The second point I argue is that contrary to the usual interpretation of his development, Heidegger's "turn" to "language" in his later works does not constitute an embrace of linguistic idealism, i.e. the belief that one can only encounter as meaningful objects that have been named in one's natural language. Instead, I argue that it remains, like discourse, a prelinguistic phenomenon, and I also note several interesting parallels between the two concepts. I conclude by making some suggestions about what is really at stake in the transition from discourse to language, and argue that the key difference lies in the fact that, for the later Heidegger, the articulation of meaning is no longer primarily a communicative phenomenon rooted in human activity.Item Nietzsche's Meta-Existentialism(2011) Acharya, Vinod; Crowell, Steven G.In this work, I offer a new interpretation of Nietzsche's existential philosophy. I argue that, methodologically, Nietzsche's existentialism is a consequence of making the typical existential position foundational, and then developing to the fullest the implications of this position. I call the resultant approach, "meta-existentialism." Further, I show that Nietzsche's meta-existential philosophy necessarily implicates his complex critique of metaphysics. In other words, his particular type of existentialism can be understood only by thoroughly investigating his criticism of metaphysical thought. Previous interpreters who have sought to portray Nietzsche as an existential thinker, such as Karl Jaspers, Walter Kaufmann and Robert Solomon, fail to seriously engage his critique of metaphysics. They set aside the latter issue, precisely in order to explicate his existentialism. My interpretation remedies this deficiency. This work also addresses those other commentators who do carefully consider Nietzsche's relation to metaphysics, although they do not interpret him as an existentialist. While poststructuralist thinkers, such as Eric Blondel, Sarah Kofman and Michel Haar, have argued that Nietzsche's thought exceeds the limits of metaphysics, other philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger, have claimed that Nietzsche remains trapped within its confines. My argument undercuts this debate by showing that Nietzsche provides an open-ended and ambiguous critique of metaphysics, in which the problem of metaphysics is never settled once and for all. By analyzing Nietzsche's central notion of "will to power" and the problem of "decadence," I show that an encounter with and an ever-renewed critique of metaphysics is essential to Nietzsche's meta-existentialism.Item The meaning of illness: A phenomenological approach to the patient-physician relationship(1990) Toombs, S. Kay E.; Crowell, Steven G.This work provides a phenomenological account of the experience of illness and the manner in which meaning is constituted in the physician-patient relationship. Rather than representing a shared reality between physician and patient, illness represents two quite distinct realities--the meaning of one being significantly and qualitatively different from the meaning of the other. This difference in meaning has important implications for medical practice in terms of achieving successful communication between doctor and patient, alleviating the patient's suffering and devising maximally effective therapeutic interventions. In disclosing the manner in which the individual constitutes the meaning of his experience, the phenomenological analysis reveals that physician and patient constitute the meaning of illness from within the context of different "worlds'--each "world" providing its own horizon of meaning. The difference in perspectives between physician and patient reflects a distinction between meaning which is grounded in lived experience and meaning which is not so grounded (between the "natural attitude" and the "naturalistic attitude"). This distinction is evident in the manner in which both illness and body are experienced differently by physician and patient. In particular, the illness constituted by the patient is distinct from, and cannot be identified with, the disease state constituted by the physician. A phenomenological analysis of body reveals that illness is fundamentally experienced by the patient as a disruption of the "lived body" rather than as a dysfunction of the biological body. This disruption of "lived body" incorporates the disorder of body, self and world and may include the disturbance of lived spatiality and lived temporality. Illness may cause the patient to objectify his body as a malfunctioning physiological organism but this conception of the body-as-object by the patient is significantly different from the physician's constitution of the body-as-scientific-object. There are certain essential characteristics which pertain to the lived experience of illness regardless of its idiosyncratic manifestation as a particular disease state. In recognizing these essential characteristics and in explicitly attending to the patient's meanings, the physician can effectively minimize the difference in understanding between himself and his patient.Item The social self: A Heideggerian account of intersubjectivity(2007) McMullin, Sheila Irene; Crowell, Steven G.This work demonstrates that one can accept Heidegger's radically new conception of human subjectivity without being committed to the negative social ontology that is often deemed to be its direct consequence. Heidegger rejects traditional theories of intersubjectivity because they characterize the self as a type of isolated, independent substance that is required to 'bridge the gap' to reach or recognize others like itself. In contrast, Heidegger argues that the self is defined by a fundamental sociality expressed by its immersion in shared public roles and norms. In doing so, however, he opens himself up to a long-standing critique: namely, by simply stipulating subjectivity's sociality, Heidegger grants it the status of an a priori category which cannot accommodate immediate experiences of others in their concrete particularity; others are simply interchangeable tokens whose uniqueness is subsumed under the generality of the established category. By engaging in an analysis of the nature of the a priori in Heidegger's work, I demonstrate that this 'social category' is in fact a responsiveness to the other in her unique temporal particularity. On this basis, I am able to provide a Heidegger-inspired account of respect and the origins of normativity. My dissertation thus provides a significantly different approach to Heidegger interpretation, and compensates for shortcomings in contemporary theories of intersubjectivity.Item Towards a better definition of 'audience': Hans Robert Jauss's 'rezeptionsaesthetik' theory(1989) Hogan, Nancy Grier; Crowell, Steven G.In this thesis, I consider the structure and nature of Hans Robert Jauss's notion of the audience and the role this notion plays in literary criticism. In light of the fact that Jauss's conception of the reader is unique and complicated (in that he does not fall neatly into any of the larger categories of the reader such as Riffaterre's "superreader" or Wolff's "intended reader"), I seek to provide a fuller explanation of the features of the audience for each reading stage. In order to flush out the characteristics of the three reading stages described by Jauss, I utilize Alfred Schutz's notions of type, typification, and finite provinces of meaning. Schutz's conception of the "finite provinces of meaning" is a helpful one when seeking to unpack the "types" which implicitly compose the activities of each reading stage. Therefore, I attempt to unravel the implicit typifications which make up Jauss's "stages of reading" as well as motivate the reasons why such a project bears some significance for our understanding of the notion of the reader as subject.