Issue 13 | December 2025
Welcome to the thirteenth issue of Exordium, the University of Queensland’s student philosophy e-journal. This issue offers an eclectic selection of papers, spanning over many fields of philosophy – we have phenomenology, ontology, epistemology, feminism, political philosophy, philosophy of language, art history, and even creative writing (something we haven’t seen in Exordium for a few years now). Such an assortment begets excitement, for it is this mixture of different approaches and foci that gives philosophy its critical power, encourages our intellectual growth, and nourishes an honest attitude towards discourse. It gives me great pleasure to be this year’s editor-in-chief after taking the responsibility from Talia Fell, who I worked with as co-editor last year. Issue 13 would not exist without the reviewing team, and I extend my warmest thanks to Kirsten Berkhout, Benjamin Chesters, Conor Jedam, Nicholas Milne, Daniel Quill, Jacob Ritz, Phoebe Sampson, and Eva Skinner. All of you have done a fantastic job and I am indebted to your hard work. Thank you to the authors who have submitted, edited, and even re-edited their work – I am very pleased to see your papers published and congratulate you on your achievement! It is wonderful to see such a talented cohort of young philosophers and to be part of the all-important effort of fostering a healthy philosophical community at UQ. If you are an undergraduate reading this, please consider submitting your work next year! Finally, to the readers, thank you from everyone involved, we hope you enjoy Issue 13 of Exordium.
Lily Elston-Leadbetter
Quietist Speech and the Phenomenological Sign
By Mikel van Dyken
Across his oeuvre, Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a novel and cutting criticism of philosophical realism. The ‘quietist’ critique finds fault with the discipline’s misuse of concepts outside of their relevant ‘language games.’ Instead, it calls for a philosophy which forgoes positing any form of explanation and, in lieu of doing so, limits itself to pure description. In practice, this is often taken up by withholding any positive theses about the ontological ‘state of things,’ and simply stating things ‘as they are.’ This obviously presents a difficult bind for philosophers wishing to produce some substantial philosophical theory. In this essay, Mikel van Dyken extends upon John McDowell’s and Paul Davies’ proposals of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl, respectively, as philosophers who manage to avoid the quietist critique. Van Dyken argues that while Kant and Husserl are largely successful in constructing a purely descriptive philosophy, they each make certain dogmatic explanatory assertions. In contrast, van Dyken proposes Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and his analysis of the lived experience of the world as a productive philosophy which succeeds in avoiding the quietist critique.
Faith: Eschatological Hope and the Absurd
By James Patterson
Kierkegaard’s treatment of the Akedah in Fear and Trembling has caused consistent confusion for ethicists and existentialists alike. In this essay, James Patterson advocates a reconsideration of the universal and absolute in Kierkegaard’s theory, and a subsequent criticism of 20th century responses. The inner workings of Abraham’s mind are a mystery to us, but we must take Kierkegaard’s attempt to unravel this display of faith seriously. Readings posited by Levinas and Derrida show compelling responses to Kierkegaard, however, they ultimately fail to realise the significance of eschatological hope – a state of mind that embraces a teleology founded on absurdity. Many criticisms of Kierkegaard do not acknowledge this, an aspect of his text which has strong textual foundations. Viewing faith as a function of eschatological hope is necessary to fully appreciate how belief sits not alongside, but above ethics.
When Freedom Learns to Bend: Adaptive Preferences and the Politics of Autonomy
By Sithara-Anne French
This article examines the relationship between autonomy and adaptive preferences, arguing that prevailing philosophical accounts, such as those of Serene Khader and Natalie Stoljar, treat adaptive preferences too superficially. Standard approaches, such as those advanced by Khader and Stoljar, tend to frame adaptive preferences as either impairments of autonomy or as incompatible with basic flourishing. Drawing on cases of intimate partner violence (IPV), Sithara-Anne French exposes a key oversight in these models: the failure to account for the complex interplay between oppression, internalised stereotypes, and preference formation. While Stoljar’s psychological processes model recognises how oppressive contexts undermine critical reflection, French argues that it does not fully address the deep psychological harms such contexts produce. Similarly, she contends that Khader’s focus on expanding options overlooks how internalised oppression can obscure the perceived value of alternatives. Engaging with feminist theorists such as Rosa Terlazzo and Martha C. Nussbaum, French proposes an expanded framework for understanding adaptive preferences, one that recognises the unconscious mechanisms by which oppression shapes desires, while preserving respect for victims’ agency. This broader account offers a more nuanced understanding of how oppressive circumstances undermine autonomy and how interventions can be designed without compounding disenfranchisement.
e-Withering: A Diachronic Analysis of Auratic Art in the New Age of Film and Livestreaming
By Xavier Woodgate
In this essay, Xavier Woodgate argues against Walter Benjamin’s claim that film, as a mechanically reproduced work of art, no longer possesses an ‘aura’, and that, rather, having left the spotlight of contemporaneity that Benjamin thought of film in, it has achieved a historicity that has established an ‘aura’ for film. However, Woodgate does not eschew Benjamin’s claim against the loss of aura in mechanically reproduced works entirely, and he maintains it against some contemporary developments in the mechanical reproduction of art through a diachronic analysis of the evolution of film into livestreaming. To create this argument, Woodgate first reconstructs the reasoning undergirding Benjamin’s claim from his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and then critically reflects on the soundness of Benjamin’s analysis in consideration of contemporary developments in the mechanical reproduction of art.
Between Seeing and Being Seen: Rembrandt’s Self-Portraiture and the Ethicality of Vision
By Andrew Millar
This essay explores the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s self-portraits from both an art historical and philosophical perspective. In this essay, Andrew Millar argues that rigorous art historical analysis that situates Rembrandt’s self-portraiture within a blossoming, observable art historical tradition intersected with market demands and historically accurate trends in art does not exclude their philosophical, psychological analysis as some art historians claim. Rather, Millar draws from phenomenological art historical methods to argue that Rembrandt’s portraits function as an exploration and disclosure of the acts of seeing and self-recognition.
Conspiratorial Thinking: Can Alternative Facts be a Philosophical Position?
By Victoria Lawson
Science, and the epistemological position of scientific realism, hold a privileged position in culture, politics, and philosophy. The proliferation of science-oriented conspiracy theories, appears initially, to be a critique of this privileged position, akin in many ways to philosophical critiques, found in scepticism and quietism. However, conspiracy thinking critiques who holds privileged access to the external world, rather than there being access to a mind-independent world (scepticism), or the use of scientific thinking in philosophy (quietism). Victoria Lawson argues that science-based conspiracy theories, using Naomi Klein, are a political, not philosophical, critique of modern culture. Inside a given conspiracy-theorist denial claim – this scientific fact is incorrect – is a separate claim, that the scientist is ‘lying to them.’ This accusation of deceit is a denial that scientists are communicating to us, an accurate account of the world, which, we do feel unsettled by.
By Ryan Hadlow
Inspired by philosophers such as Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Kafka, this literary work explores key themes of Existentialism and Absurdism, uniting them to question what it truly means to live a meaningful life and whether the search for meaning can ever be a productive pursuit. Through the eyes of the protagonist, Thomas, the reader experiences the same torment that arises from this struggle. The work explores nihilism and despair, yet the conclusion seeks to uncover a more hopeful path, one that encourages a renewed pursuit capable of uplifting the reader and those who have faced, or are facing, thoughts of suicide.
Extending Adorno: The Culture Industry, Literature, and Language
By Melinda Herman
While the majority of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ presents a diagnostic account of the culture industry’s institutionalising sameness as a by-product of modern capitalism, the final section of their essay undergoes a rapid and distinct turn towards linguistic analysis. In this essay Melinda Herman argues that this shift in analytical target indicates a deeper relationship between the culture industry’s ubiquity and its effect on language – one that can be expanded upon to account for literature’s position in modern society. To do so, Herman extracts a holistic account of language under capitalism from ‘The Culture Industry’ and Adorno’s broader philosophy of language, arguing that the culture industry’s self-supporting sameness, as manifest in advertising’s extensivity, translates into a degradation of language’s meaning-making capacity. Words function representationally, designating things, not meaning. From this standpoint, she introduces a relatively obscure essay by Adorno, ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,’ which ties literature’s formal function to its description of subjectively lived specificity. Herman ultimately concludes that this role is deeply problematised by the culture industry’s hegemonic sameness, reducing the meaning-making capacity of language to a hollow representationalism at direct odds with its artistic function.
Are Women and the Poor Competent Voters? Active and Passive Citizens in a Kantian State
By Emma Fensom
In this essay, Emma Fensom examines Immanuel Kant’s distinction between active and passive citizens within his rightful state. In particular, Fensom focuses on whether such distinction can justify denying suffrage to those deemed ‘dependent’, and thus passive within society. Ultimately, she finds Kant’s distinction to be arbitrary and grounded in prejudice. Further, Fensom argues that a Kantian state will never be able to create the necessary conditions for those deemed passive to become active, where it cannot be guaranteed that active citizens will always vote in accordance with the general will.
Image by Bekky Bekks via Unsplash
EXORDIUM 