https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150331 2026-11-10T05:22:38Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150598 Title: The passport : aesthetics as a tool of colonialism from empire to passport apartheid Abstract: This dissertation argues that the passport today is not neutral but is tied to enduring colonial structures that dictate the rights, identity, and mobility of all citizens of the world. I examine this across three main ideas: the historical, the visual and the ethical. My dissertation looks at 199 passports of UN states, plus some observers and some Indigenous passports where available from 2024 to 2026. I examine their designs, languages, and the conditions within them. By exploring the works of many authors and researchers, including Quijano, Scott, Anderson, Saussure, Fanon, hooks, Singer, Levinas, Rawls, Arendt, Foucault, and Bauman, I have developed the argument that the passport perpetuates colonial inheritance in three ways. Firstly, it does so by restricting the mobility of formerly colonised populations. Next, by privileging Western aesthetics as the dominant and legitimate visual framework, and lastly by imposing European categories of identity that reconstruct what it means to be a person. I hope my dissertation contributes to raising awareness of the passport, how it is used today, its history, and its consequences. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.) 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150590 Title: Beyond anthropocentric animal ethics : the radical distinctiveness of Alphonso Lingis’ animal philosophy Abstract: This dissertation examines Alphonso Lingis’ animal philosophy as a radical challenge to the anthropocentric assumptions that have shaped Western philosophy. The opening chapter situates Lingis against the anthropocentric assumptions of Western philosophy. That background then allows me to show the uniqueness of Lingis’ phenomenology of embodied expressivity and the ethical demands that arise from encounters between living beings. Through his account of sensuous communication, bodily vulnerability, and the continuity of flesh, Lingis challenges models that ground meaning in rationality or language and instead advocates for a shared field of affective life, common across all species. The dissertation further explores how his concepts of community, trust, and finitude dissolve human-animal boundaries altogether, allowing for the repositioning of animals as equals. Identifying animals as expressive others who summon responsibility. A final critical engagement with contemporary thinkers allows for an assessment of the scope of Lingis’ project and allows me to argue that his work offers one of the most distinctive contributions to multispecies ethics. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.) 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150589 Title: The self turned inward and outward Augustine on interiority, relation and community Abstract: This dissertation argues that Augustine's conception of interiority, far from the solipsistic or politically sterile notion it is often taken to be, is the very condition of genuine engagement with the world and with others. Against modern suspicions of inwardness as a relic of Cartesian individualism, and against reductive readings of Augustine as either a proto-modern subjectivist or a purely otherworldly theologian, I recover an Augustinian phenomenology of interiority that is relational, affective, and politically generative. The work proceeds in two parts. The first traces Augustine's inward turn through its intellectual and volitional dimensions. Drawing on his Neoplatonic inheritance while attending to the transformations wrought by his Christian commitments, I argue that Augustine's inwardness is best understood as a spiritual exercise which reveals not a sealed private chamber but a self that is constitutively open, fragmented, and dependent. The failure of purely intellectual ascent, exemplified in the transient vision of Book VII of the Confessions, discloses that the intellect is downstream of the will, and that genuine self-knowledge requires not the refinement of reason alone but the reordering of love - one only achieved through humility, and paradigmatically realised not in solitary ascent but in the shared vision at Ostia. The second part extends this account outward. Engaging critically with Hannah Arendt's reading of Augustinian caritas as otherworldly and dissolving of particularity, I argue that once the Incarnation is taken seriously as an ontological claim, to love the neighbour in God is to encounter them at the precise point of their concrete vulnerability and dignity. Drawing on John Kiess's work on mourning, I propose that shared encounters with suffering function at the social level as confession functions at the level of the self - interrupting false exteriorities, cultivating humility, and opening communities to a transformation they cannot generate from within. Augustine thus offers a compelling resource for contemporary debates on selfhood and political life, grounding genuine community in the never-completed process of conversion. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.) 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/150588 Title: Making emotion linguistically intelligible : the objective correlative in poetic language Abstract: Emotion is considered private and difficult to communicate in poetic language. The view results from mistaking the meaning of words strictly as the objects they denote. By synthesising Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of language as public practice and T. S. Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative, it follows that emotion can be communicated in poetic language through constructing the correct objective correlative for it. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein demonstrates the multiplicity and publicness of language. Following this framework, emotion can be communicated when the rules of language-games are followed. The concept of the objective correlative, introduced by Eliot in Hamlet and His Problems, follows the rules of language-games in poetry and commits to the publicness of language and emotion. Examples from Eliot’s The Waste Land and Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night further illustrate how the objective correlative succeeds when it embeds itself in public practices and the shared form of life. As a result, this synthesised framework provides a practical guideline for communicating emotion in poetic language. Description: B.A. (Hons)(Melit.) 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z