Senior Thesis
Embracing the Ridiculous: Evaluating Plato’s Account of Comedy
Stories and Essays
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Non-fiction Essay– December, 2021
Excerpted from “Now Available on Digital Blu-Ray”
There are few moments more exciting than walking into a class and discovering that your teacher is going to show the class a movie. Even if afterwards you have to write a paper about it, having that unexpected break in the day, being able to sit back in a dark room for an hour and watch something on a projector– it may not be how a film was intended, but the classroom makes for a great watching experience.
Movies outside of class, however, are more of a chore. Especially if that movie is Apocalypse Now, a Vietnam War film based on the book Heart of Darkness. Apocalypse Now clocks in at just over three hours– you can bet that’s a homework assignment even the best of students are avoiding.
My English teacher senior year was a pretty smart guy, so he rallied the class for a big Apocalypse Now watch party. We came to school late on a Sunday afternoon, and he had it all set up on a huge screen in the theater. Twenty of us filled incorrectly into one of the middle rows, peering back at our teacher as he smirked from behind the glass of the light and sound booth. He used the microphone to inform us that intermission would occur at about the halfway point, and not to be alarmed by anything we saw on screen. Intermission? At a movie? We had no clue what we were in for.
Academic Essay– April 2020
Excerpted from “Causation and the Passage of Time”
McTaggart considers change a fundamental quality of time. In a similar vein, Kant treats causality as a core part of the experiential reality of time. Because of the crucial role that causation plays in our understanding of time, it is worthwhile to attempt to define it. Leibniz believed that the assigning of temporal qualities to events was simply our understanding of a stand-alone causal relationship. However, problems arise when trying to seperate causality from the concept of time in this way, because any definition of causality relies on temporal asymmetry. A cause is understood to be the event that precedes an effect; in other words, the event that comes before another in time. Attempts to make causality a primitive concept fail to hold water as well, because as David Hume points out, we actually only experience associations of events. As neuroscientist David Eagleman writes in his book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, “At bottom, causality requires a temporal order judgement,” (53). There is no denying that causality and time are inextricably linked.
Furthermore, the way in which our brain interprets the world shows the deep connection between causation and the passage of time. Le Poidevin has argued that temporal qualities are like color, and that they are not real properties of the objects we associate them with. This comparison seems to hold up, as just as colors are seen differently by different people, altered perspectives and speed can change our interpretation of the order of events. As Eaglemen writes, “Time perception is an active area of investigation in my laboratory and others, but the overarching point I want to make here is that our sense of time– how much time passed and what happened when– is constructed by our brains. And this sense is easily manipulated, just like our vision can be,” (53). It is hard to deny that the brain is constructing a large part of our sense of time, but it has not been shown that the brain is also inventing causation. There may be no "absolute" present, but there could still be causal relations between events. In the same way that comparing colors reveals differences in light, temporal relations could be having a similar effect with causal events. Unless we are also idealists about causality, our inability to define causation outside of temporal terms means that despite the clear issues we have in perceiving and understanding it, we can’t dismiss the possibility that time is real.
Character Sketch– September, 2019
The crowds rushed by him like a river washes over a log stuck in the mud, allowing Clete to make his way unrecognized out the side door. He zipped up his gray hoodie and gently shifted the weight of his gym bag over to his left shoulder. His right shoulder still ached from the collision at the end of the third quarter. I’m getting too old for this, he thought.
“Hey Clovis!” a man shouted to his left.
“No it’s Cleon!” his companion interrupted him, laughing much too hysterically.
“Well whatever your name is, you cost me twenty bucks out there!”
Clete ignored the hecklers, just as he had for the last twenty years. Back when the hair on his head was still dark and wavy, and his legs were loose enough to let him dodge the type of tackles that now left him sore every morning, Clete had been more engaging with the faceless fans who thought they knew better. It used to bother him when people questioned his decision-making– in fact, it fired him up. The whole reason he became a referee in the first place was because of that frustrating feeling that now confronted him in a way that was ten times worse. He hated watching games and having the outcome determined by an unathletic old man, jogging around haphazardly in those unflattering zebra stripes. He always wanted to shout back at the angry faces outside the gate and explain to them that no, actually the rule book states a 10-second runoff was required in that situation because of the incomplete pass. No one understood that this was his life. He was never going to mess up.
Now it was as if those comments had worn away his resolve, and that fire to defend himself had burnt out. Clete opened the door of his old sedan and slid in gingerly. He looked forward to a quiet night at home. No one called him Clovis or Cleon or idiot referee at home, and it was much easier to avoid a lazy German Shepherd then a linebacker. Clete turned on his headlights as he left the still-lit stadium behind him. The moon seemed tired as it peered out from behind the clouds. Clete sighed, checked his mirrors, and merged onto the highway.