Micah Phua is a writer and editor, passionate about stories that inform as much as they entertain.
Miscellaneous
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Academic
- Philosophy - Capstone Paper
The Role of Innate Dispositions in Forming Religious Belief:
A Brief Reconciliation of Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant
Introduction
In this paper, I will attempt to highlight a conversation between Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant not immediately apparent in their seeming epistemological differences regarding their usage of “concepts,” by reconciling the ways in which their approach to religious belief connect with one another and inform each other. To begin, I will explicate what Reid and Kant take to mean by “concepts,” in order to establish a cursory understanding of their epistemologies in general—for the former, this results in direct realism, and for the latter, transcendental idealism. Following that explanation, I will describe Reid and Kant’s epistemology of religious belief, detailing the ways in which they resonate with each other. Despite their fundamental epistemological differences, their intuitions about the formation of religious belief point in the same direction, even if their response to the skeptic differs.
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- English Literature - Capstone Paper
Ambivalence in Midnight’s Children:
Saleem Sinai’s Narrative Failure as Postmodern Success Story
In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem Sinai, attempts to do the impossible—that is, to wrest control of his life’s story and to tell it with a sense of singular purpose and eminence. This proves impossible because his narrative is fundamentally flawed. His story ventures forth as a form of discursive resistance, but eventually fails (and in some cases, even concedes defeat on a metafictional level) to simultaneously claim agency over his own life, and do justice to the multitude of voices he encounters, including the story of the nation of India at large, since much of his life parallels key events in the country’s independence. This failure is primarily an exercise in being “almost the same but not quite”. Midnight’s Children, read through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” reveals the futile pursuit of identity inherent in the vastly ambivalent relationship of discourse between the coloniser and colonised on two levels—Saleem’s own life journey and his life as national allegory for India.
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Saleem Sinai’s Narrative Failure as Postmodern Success Story
In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem Sinai, attempts to do the impossible—that is, to wrest control of his life’s story and to tell it with a sense of singular purpose and eminence. This proves impossible because his narrative is fundamentally flawed. His story ventures forth as a form of discursive resistance, but eventually fails (and in some cases, even concedes defeat on a metafictional level) to simultaneously claim agency over his own life, and do justice to the multitude of voices he encounters, including the story of the nation of India at large, since much of his life parallels key events in the country’s independence. This failure is primarily an exercise in being “almost the same but not quite”. Midnight’s Children, read through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” reveals the futile pursuit of identity inherent in the vastly ambivalent relationship of discourse between the coloniser and colonised on two levels—Saleem’s own life journey and his life as national allegory for India.
...
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- The Abundance - Book Review
Parenthood and Profession is Reconciled by Food in The Abundance
Amit Majmudar’s latest novel, The Abundance, paints a picture of motherhood that speaks to the vast array of cultural divides in immigrant families. While the detailed exposition—alongside his emphasis on the culinary motif of Indian food—Majmudar employs to shed light on these divides between the narrator’s family proves to be heavy-handed at times, they, more often than not, enable the reader to witness, with startling clarity, the manner in which immigrant families fragment, and come together, in their home away from home.
...
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Amit Majmudar’s latest novel, The Abundance, paints a picture of motherhood that speaks to the vast array of cultural divides in immigrant families. While the detailed exposition—alongside his emphasis on the culinary motif of Indian food—Majmudar employs to shed light on these divides between the narrator’s family proves to be heavy-handed at times, they, more often than not, enable the reader to witness, with startling clarity, the manner in which immigrant families fragment, and come together, in their home away from home.
...
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- “Video Games as Narrative Medium”
Learning How to Die
“You Died.”
These words pop up on your screen in blood-red font every time you fall prey to the various denizens of Lordran. And after your screen fades to black, and you possibly throw your controller away in frustration, you reload the game from the nearest checkpoint and dive back into the world. You are infuriated, but also determined to best that which brought about your demise. You die, over and over and over again, and frustration hangs over your head like an ominous stormcloud of doom. But, it is this way of dying, and learning and re-learning through your past mistakes and experiences, that reveal the world’s elements in meaningful ways. Each death brings you closer to completion and closure, to understanding more of the multi-faceted and open-ended story.
...
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“You Died.”
These words pop up on your screen in blood-red font every time you fall prey to the various denizens of Lordran. And after your screen fades to black, and you possibly throw your controller away in frustration, you reload the game from the nearest checkpoint and dive back into the world. You are infuriated, but also determined to best that which brought about your demise. You die, over and over and over again, and frustration hangs over your head like an ominous stormcloud of doom. But, it is this way of dying, and learning and re-learning through your past mistakes and experiences, that reveal the world’s elements in meaningful ways. Each death brings you closer to completion and closure, to understanding more of the multi-faceted and open-ended story.
...
(Read more)