Settler Colonialism and Mainstream Economics

The general purpose of this research is to ask how mainstream economics understands the nature of being (ontology) and how the discipline produces knowledge (epistemology). In this Major Paper, I critically study the Settler colonial patterns embedded in Canadian mainstream economics, and economics in general. First of all, I perform a content analysis of several Canadian economics textbooks with a specific look at three critical terms: land, wealth and economics. For the surveyed textbooks, the latter terms are absolutely detached, erasing Indigenous thought and bodies from economics education. I understand the disconnection as a biased and constructed narrative, as theoretically depicted by critical Indigenous studies and Settler colonial studies. All in all, the ontological basis of Canadian economics education reproduces the systematic violence of Settler colonialism: dispossession and replacement. Second of all, I investigate early and modern versions of the Staples thesis to outline the Settler colonial discourse at the center of Canadian economics history. For instance, Staples theorists do not critically connect the colonial foundations that enabled the commercial development of staples industries since the 17th century. Indeed, some Marxist and political science scholars argue that the study of staples industries in Canada requires a better focus on the socio-political context embedding economic relationships pertaining to a staples commodity. Finally, with a clearer picture of Canadian mainstream economics' ontology, I investigate how the discipline (in general) produces knowledge. Indeed, as the mainstream method for economists, mathematical-deduction reproduces knowledge that follows prior beliefs. If colonialism is erased from the memory, the ontology, of economists then it is a very narrowed history that economists rely on. Ultimately, I argue that economics is not innocent in its study economic relationships - all economic relationships (e.g. trading, gifts, energy, love and such). To conclude, I dare experiment with an accounting methodology using a revised Staples thesis and ecological footprint analysis, with a focus on petrochemical economic relationships within itself, the people and the land

The dialectical logic of Thucydides' Melian dialogue

"#2338"--handwritten on coverSeries from publisher's listIncludes bibliographical references"The substance of this paper was first given in 1979 as a talk at the University of Maryland, College Park; a revised version was presented in March 1980 at the Los Angeles annual meeting of the International Studies Association, for a panel on Dialectical Approaches to International Studies."Financed by NSF. 780670

Speaking in circles: completeness in Kant's metaphysics and mathematics

This dissertation presents and responds to the following problem. For Kant a field of enquiry can be a science only if it is systematic. Most sciences achieve systematicity through having a unified content and method. Physics, for example, has a unified content, as it is the science of matter in motion, and a unified method because all claims in physics must be verified through empirical testing. In order for metaphysics to be a science it also must be systematic. However, metaphysics cannot have a unified content or method because metaphysicians lack a positive conception of what its content and method are. On Kant's account, metaphysicians can say with certainty what metaphysics does not study and what methods it cannot use, but never how it should proceed. Without unified content and method systematicity can only be guaranteed by some either means, namely, completeness. Without completeness metaphysics cannot have systematicity and every science must be systematic. Completeness can only be achieved if we severely limit the scope of metaphysics so that it contains only the conditions for the possibility of experience. This dissertation defends the claims made about the centrality of completeness in understanding Kant's conception of metaphysics as a science in two ways. First, the first two chapters point to a substantial body of textual evidence that supports the idea that Kant was directly concerned about the notion of completeness and links it to his conception of metaphysics as a science. Chapters 3 and 4 consider some possible objections to thinking that metaphysics as a science can be complete, giving special consideration to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Chapter 5 explains why, if this position is as clear as this dissertation has argued, previous scholars have failed to acknowledge it. Giving a full answer to this question requires considering the general neglect of the "Doctrine of Method" section of Kant's primary theoretical text, The Critique of Pure Reason. The Doctrine of Method contains many of the passages which most directly support my thesis. Chapter 6 explains why scholars have ignored this important passage and argues that they should not continue to do so

The Trail, 1980-05-01

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/thetrail_all/2279/thumbnail.jp

2009 Acropolis

2009 Acropolis yearbook for Whittier College.https://poetcommons.whittier.edu/acropolis/1035/thumbnail.jp

A poetics of Jesus: a/christology in the early fiction of George Eliot

This thesis argues for a reading of George Eliot's early fiction - Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss - as an exercise in developing what I have termed a poetics of Jesus. This constitutes a poetics that is a space of continual clearing (lichtung) and an ultimate deconstruction of barriers that inhibit the nexus of the subject and the sacred. I reflect on the work of eighteenth and nineteenth century Anglo-German Higher Criticism and Victorian novelists and situate George Eliot as a writer who seeks to transfigure poetics as that which recovers what John Hick has termed a 'language of love'. This is a language that comes before the systemic formalism found in Christian poetics after Augustine to F.C. Baur, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss. In her fiction George Eliot achieves what I term a transfigurational language that is different from contemporary writers of the Victorian period. In the development of her poetics from Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and through The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot juxtaposes the evoked image of Christ with her fiction in order to let both image and word interact. Eliot's fiction allows the tension between representation and conception of Christ to produce a recovery of a poetics that is similar to the notion of Christ expressed by Thomas Altizer as 'an apocalyptic totality if only because it embodies such a radical and total transformation'. Ultimately, Eliot's fiction offers what I term a poetic cartography of grace that provides a map of meaning which cannot be limited within the space of language. In the act of moving through the sign/signifiers of the sacred, George Eliot exemplifies a poetics that reaches beyond language and outside the limits of theological discourse, evoking an 'a/christology' that actually embodies the figure of Jesus as 'true fiction'