Philosophy, Theology, and Integrity

Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI), such as ChatGPT, has opened numerous potential futures for university education. This study explores the current state of generative AI in universities to understand how the present trends may affect its role in the future of academia. Through analyzing different university policies, examining interviews with professors across different disciplines, and reviewing relevant statistical data, this thesis focuses on how generative AI is altering the way institutions tackle teaching practices, student learning, and academic integrity. By assessing the current impact of generative AI, the thesis aims to provide insight into how universities can approach and adapt to its growing influence in the years ahead.

This thesis explores the work of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty on embodiment, intersubjectivity, and otherness as it relates to our experience of social media platforms. For Merleau-Ponty, intersubjectivity and subjectivity, understood as embodied, are co-constitutive. Beginning with embodiment and moving to intersubjectivity, I consider the fundamental relationship among the body, the other, and the world to understand how social media profoundly affects our relationship to an other and our sense of embodiment. Furthermore, the discussion of embodiment, intersubjectivity, and world entails a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s consistent critiques of dualisms, like self/world or subject/object, and scientific thought. This paper likewise examines those critiques to understand the effect that social media has not only on our intersubjective experiences, but also on our sense of embodiment and relationship to the world.

This thesis aims to illustrate the continuity of covenant theology leading to social contract theory and eventually how it inspired our modern understanding of constitutionalism. The thesis will articulate how philosophical understandings of covenant evolved and became interchangeable with thoughts on social contract, which played an influential role on the founding fathers. The point of this essay is not to argue that social contract is a faithful successor to covenant theology; rather, it is to show the development of social contract and, in turn, use contract theory to bridge the influence of covenant theology to the American Constitution.

My thesis explores Hannah Arendt’s theory of forgiveness in The Human Condition and seeks to work through some challenges and paradoxes regarding its potential as a political concept. I argue that Arendt’s theory of forgiveness, while it grasps the fundamental ontological character of forgiveness as a potential “new beginning,” falls short of what Derrida rightly identifies as its most fundamental problem: forgiving the unforgivable. My project aims to radicalize Arendt’s forgiveness by reading it in relation to her concept of natality, which when seen in this light complicates the question of the limits of forgiveness. My work here treats the concept of forgiveness in relation to questions of secularization, political theology, sovereignty, law, psychoanalysis, history, violence, and political action. Raising the question of the possibility of political forgiveness reveals that its central concern is precisely “possibility.”  Forgiving is a making possible.