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Published by the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University
Fall 2008
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Lesley Fredin, An Existential Analysis of The Zahir
This paper will catalogue main existential terms that have parallels in The
Zahir by Paulo Coelho. The terms that will be explored in the paper are
anxiety, the Other, the they, freedom, death, and storytelling. The paper will
use sections from the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul
Sartre in its analysis of these themes. It will conclude with a discussion of
the meaning Coelho finds in life and question whether or not there is a similar
meaning that can be found when reading the philosophers addressed in the paper.
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Fran Muhrer, Mythos for the Irrational Mind
This paper explores Plato’s use of myths in three major dialogues: The
Republic, Phaedrus, and Phaedo. Why does Plato choose to utilize
mythos alongside of logos in his dialogues? I argue that the placement
and subject matter of the mythos in each dialogue indicate Plato uses mythos
to drive home the points Socrates makes through logos by appealing to the
irrational part of the soul.
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Joe Rees,
Perception, Particular, and Universals: Aristotle’s Perceiver Explained
In Book II Chapter 19 of Aristotle’s work Posterior Analytics,
Aristotle briefly mentions a puzzling assertion about his understanding of
perception. He notes “though one perceives the particular, perception
is of the universal” (Aristotle 1996, APo 100b1). This assertion is
seemingly contradictory, since it seems to make two opposite claims at once.
In this paper I explain the soundness of Aristotle’s claim in light of
other of Aristotle’s concepts including Aristotle’s epistemology,
the rational part of the soul, and universals/particulars and illustrate the
consequences of Aristotle’s perception.
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Katie Young, Baruch Spinoza and the Marquis de Sade
This paper is an exploration of some of the differences and similarities between the Radical Enlightenment philosophies of Baruch Spinoza and the Marquis de Sade by virtue of discussing two major themes of their philosophy—metaphysical conceptions of God and of Nature and their ideas about religion and morality. Through a comparison of Spinoza and de Sade we see two different yet connected conceptions of the world spring forth from the philosophical environment of the Radical Enlightenment in Europe.
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