Philosophy

My research explored different therapeutic models of addiction from a philosophy lens, evaluating the role agency and self-identity play in addiction. Using the widely known 12-step model, this paper discusses the moral model, genetic model, brain disease model, and existential model of addiction. Ultimately, I conclude that addiction needs to be approached from a more individualistic model that acknowledges the variety of factors that play a role in the disorder.

My research focused on the reification and maintenance of the concept of race in the United States, through the application of Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony. This research also attempted to demonstrate how cultural hegemony constructed an agreement among all classes and social groups through coercion and cooperation to ensure repression. Furthermore, my analysis was supplemented by phenomenological accounts of those who have experienced racial inequality in the United States, to explain the impact of race not only as a concept, but as a constructed reality.

I was born and raised in the second most dangerous city in America, Detroit, Michigan. When you are from a city full of crime and poverty, hardships become endless. As a child growing up in these conditions your options are limited. You grow up to either engage in crime, spend your life in jail, continue the low income life you were born into, lose your life as a victim of crime, become a victim to crime by losing your life, or pursue other paths. Sometimes in places like Detroit, the other paths are what changes your life in many good ways that you don’t realize until you're older.

I propose that the practice of chemistry often reduces its subject matter into a vacuous form of itself; that we erroneously equate truth values assigned to states of matter with forms so mitigated or changed that they are no longer ontologically dependent on—nor can they feasibly describe—the original substance in question. During this fellowship, I examined objects in general and how their identities and demands on existence affect the types of ontological commitments we can justifiably devote ourselves to.

Ordinarily, when we think about disagreement, we think about disagreeing with others. Interpersonal disagreement is essentially about dissimilarity, but what would it mean for the self to be dissimilar? For Heidegger, care is the structure of Dasein, and the structure of care is the “ahead-of-itself.” For Sartre, the self is separated from its being by the nothingness positioned between the two. Modern existentialism rests on the proposition that we are perpetually other than ourselves, but what is disagreement aside from otherness?