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David Potter, writing on the subject of narrative validity and historiography in the Classics, cites Pliny the Younger recounting a story heard at a dinner party, I trust the person who told it, although what is truth to poets? Still, the person who told the story is one of whom you might think well if you were to write history. (9.33.1, qtd. in Potter 5) Pliny's good-natured remark seems to question the truthfulness of poets while at the same time crediting this particular poet with a kind of cultural reliability. What is poetic truth, anyway? In "Ode on a Grecian Urn" John Keats equates truth with beauty (Ferguson et al. 939). Shelley, of course, famously claims in the last line of A Defence of Poetry that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" (568). In "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," William Carlos Williams claims that poetry contains truth essential to our survival: "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there" (Ferguson et al. 1283). Taoists say that "knowledge of Tao lodges in the same part of the mind as poetry," which is why ancient Taoist texts like the Tao te Ching are often written in verse: "There is the same quick perception" (Deng, 365 Tao 63).

Imagine you are in charge of a large international media corporation. Your employees live in different countries, hail from a diversity of backgrounds, and have a variety of points of view. You recently decided that you would like to improve communication and discussion within the company. In particular, you would like to invest in some software addons to your email system to enhance the exchange of ideas among employees. This softwarebased strategy involves a few steps. Your first step in improving communication is to purchase translation software. This software takes sentences from an email and transforms those sentences into sentences with equivalent meanings in a different language. Moreover, recent impressive innovations in translation technology - developed by Davidson, Inc. - enable the software to provide translations of sentences in languages for which there is no prefabricated translation manual. This feature - radical translation - uses information about the context in which the email was written, as well as the sentences in other emails and their context of writing, to determine the meanings of the sentences. By determining the meaning of foreign sentences, translation software enables those speaking different languages to understand one another. It thus removes one roadblock to deliberation and communication within the company: that an employee might not be able to decipher the propositional content of another employee's sentences.

At first glance, Kant's political thought can appear bafflingly inconsistent. On one hand, Kant holds that political authority is justified exclusively as a necessary precondition to our individual freedom. On the other hand, Kant seems at times to embrace a deeply repressive account of state power. He declares that the state's laws are necessarily consistent with our freedom, and yet he insists that we must not resist even the most unbearable injustices perpetrated by despotic regimes. In the pages that follow, I will attempt to reconcile these seemingly conflicting aspects of Kant's political thought. Part of the trick involves noticing that, for Kant, there is no difference between law and justified political power. Kant's justification for political power is formal-and therefore legal-in nature. A formal account of political legitimacy entails a formal account of political obligation. This raises challenging questions about our specific obligations: if our obligations do not depend on anyone's actual intentions or material interests, then how can we know definitively what the state has obligated us to do? I will show that our legal obligations are exactly those actions that we are rationally required to undertake or refrain from undertaking as a result of the state's legitimate exercise of its coercive power.

This dissertation has the character of an untimely meditation on two key figures in the history of political philosophy. The thought of Martin Heidegger and of Friedrich Nietzsche pose, independently of one another and in theoretical proximity, some of the most pressing challenges to modern thought. Granted the provocative, quite often "liminal" mode of reason and style of these two radical thinkers, it is in the spirit of intellectual open-mindedness - to dialogically persist in the pursuit of the examined life at the core of our tradition - that I propose this essay at what we might call the interstice between hermeneutics and political philosophy. Heidegger and Nietzsche bring to our attention a "spiritual crisis" of epic proportions that in their account originates in European culture and that has become increasingly global in the contemporary world. It is my intent in this project to shed light on the ontological sources of this potentially transformative event, to understand and test the soundness of its claims, while pursuing a dialogue and apprenticeship with the towering figures at the forefront of the on-going history of political philosophy.

The human mirror neuron system (MNS) offers a clear connection between phenomenology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science that has profound implications for understanding the actions, emotions and intentions of others. Given that the MNS is a trimodal system composed of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex that respond to motor, visual, and auditory stimulation, such as when an action is performed, observed, or heard (D'Ausilio, 2007), the role of the audio-visual MNS for understanding the actions and emotions of others illuminates the importance of phenomenological approaches to embodied cognition for philosophy, Buddhist meditation and neuroscience. For example, the MNS exemplifies an integration of first-person subjective levels of lived-bodily experience, and third-person objective accounts stemming from within cognitive neuroscience, which is known as neurophenomenology. This approach has important implications for understanding the role that emotion and empathy play in embodied simulation in the MNS. Neurophenomenology and the study of the MNS are important for closing the explanatory gap in philosophy of mind, and for surmounting the mind-body problem. The explanatory gap refers to a "gap" in our understanding of how to relate first-person, subjective levels of experience with a third-person, objective and scientific account stemming from within neurophysiology and brain science (Bayne, 2004; Lutz and Thompson, 2003). Lastly, a neurophenomenological method of investigation is also being invoked in recent studies with Buddhist meditation and neuroscience, by identifying the neural correlates of compassion, emotional regulation and attention, which is a contemplative neuroscience approach for closing the explanatory gap as well.

There is a common perspective on education today which has inscribed within it certain problematic assumptions regarding the nature of human agency and knowledge acquisition. We often work under the assumption that we, as educational practitioners, can indeed adequately ascertain and assess the condition of one's learning in a relatively straightforward manner without the threat of serious harm. But can we, in fact, rest confidently on such an assumption? Is education simply the transmission and internalization of information, and our duty then simply to transmit and verify (through tests) whether that transmission was a success? Or does the very manner in which we conceptualize education (an the agents engaged in the process) carry with it moral, social and political implications? The purpose of this thesis is to not merely illustrate the latter, but more specifically to illustrate how the widely held perspective on education today takes for granted a profoundly dis-abling perspective of human agency which serves to obscure the subtleties of learning along with the transformative capacity we each possess.

For the first time, we have a biography that takes an unflinching look at the woman whose ascent mirrors that of many powerful American women before and since, one full of the compromises and complicities women have undertaken throughout time in order to find security for themselves and make their mark on history. She was a shape-shifter who was obsessed with crafting her own reputation, at once deeply invested in staking claim to her own power while also opposing women's suffrage. With narrative verve and fresh eyes, Untold Power is a richly overdue examination of one of American history's most influential, complicated women as well as the surprising and often absurd realities of American politics.