Tag: Erin McKenna

Gendered Perceptions and Emotions of Intercourse and Trauma

Presenter: Adriane Knorr

Faculty Mentor: Erin McKenna

Presentation Type: Poster 19

Primary Research Area: Social Science

Major: Philosophy

By interweaving philosophy of the mind, the anatomical body as well as feministic theories given by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we can see how perceptions and emotions relating to trauma and sex are often considered to differ along gender lines. Sex and trauma are very closely linked in the human brain regarding the emotional and physical ties that remain after the acts. This presentation is a combination of a literary review of Gilman’s work and a scientific study of whether or not emotions can be gendered due to social constructs and anatomy. Gilman’s argument shows how she believes that male brains have gotten the opportunity to grow physically as well as mentally over time. This has led to gendered primality of the emotions and perceptions from our everyday lives. The neurological studies suggest an argument that neurological differences between the sexes have been linked with greater impulsivity and aggression in males. According to this argument, men are able to build metaphorical webs within their lives that lack the plethora of emotions that women often tie to their worlds. This can have a possible hindering effect on women when they try to move on after traumatic events due to denser connections to emotions that come tied to their memories. These three arguments derive an answer to the gendered emotions and perceptions that are prevalent in trauma and sex. Combining male and female brain discrepancies with the differences in cognitive understanding of sex and trauma we can see that the perceptions and emotions are heavily gendered based on social constructs as well as the scientific understandings of male and female anatomy.

Peirce’s phenomenological grounding of Science and Matters therein

Presenter(s): Timothy Schatz—Philosophy, Math

Faculty Mentor(s): Scott Pratt, Erin McKenna

Session 1: It’s a Science Thing

Any survey of C .S . Peirce’s philosophy will reveal a vast but shattered continent . Hence, any reader who ventures beyond a single text will have to ask themselves how they are to regard the relation of these texts . I am aligned with the unitary interpretation, espoused by the late Dr . Joseph M . Ransdell, and so affirm the Peircean system as essentially phenomenological . The divisions of science, or systems of science, maintains three divisions: mathematics, philosophy, and special science . Phenomenology finds its home in philosophy, and it is here where knowing first encounters being . As such, following Peirce’s underlying gestures towards positive philosophy, post-Kantian empiricism, realism, and christen mysticism, phenomenology naturally arises as ground and loci of his philosophy, insofar as it places the subject in a living world . In the first division of this work, the general system of phenomenological reflection reveals a form of knowing which is inherently human in which beings are known as a world and not disparate things . This reflection is threefold in which reflection folds back onto itself to reveal the triadic structure of Being . Thus the second division shall take up the triadic structure, the categories, in phenomenological detail qua their expression in being . Lastly, this paper culminates in the general architecture of phenomenology, which serves as the ground for Peirce’s Weltanschauung, that is, his conception of the cosmos .