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Ethics In Times Of Plague: Home Care, Obligations To Treat, End Of Life, And Public Policies, Michael Woods Nash

Masters Theses

Almost exclusively, clinical bioethicists pose and answer questions in the context of day-to-day, medical practice in the West. This setting abounds with therapeutic procedures, drugs, and other resources to restore comfort and health to persons who suffer. In making moral judgments, we focus on patients, attend at times to their families, and—most rarely—consider the well-being of the rest of society as it is affected by particular treatment decisions.

Although this approach has resulted in a measure of moral progress with respect to our standard, clinical setting, it all but neglects the unique and compelling questions that arise in the context …

Zen And The Samurai: Rethinking Ties Between Zen And The Warrior, James Earl Hataway Jr.

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the supposed ties between the samurai warrior of Japan and the Zen school of Buddhism. It has been suggested by numerous authors that Zen served as the foundation of warrior training methods and ethical codes. This study suggests that the relationship between warrior and Zen has been overstated, and the image of the Zen warrior was largely a product of intense nationalism that dominated Japanese political and religious institutions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Practicality Of The Abhidhammattha-Sangaha, Jeffrey Wayne Bass

Masters Theses

This study centers on a close analysis of the Abhidhammattha-Sangaha-- a compendium of Abhidhamma philosophy written by a Sri Lankan monk named Acariya Anuruddha Mahathera sometime between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Through a detailed comparison of the Abhidhammattha-Sangaha to its sources, I am able to demonstrate that the text represents an important innovation in the Abhidhamma tradition. First of all, in the Sangaha, the building blocks of its primary source are rearranged by degrees of meditative attainment. We will see that the Sangaha's author systematized the prior material into a clearly stratified map of meditative states. Also, in his …

The Critical Race Theory Of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Corey V. Kittrell

Masters Theses

This essay is a critical exploration of Kwame Anthony Appiah's race theory. I examine the two distinct projects that make up this theory. The first project is an analytical project in which he utilizes methods from the philosophy of language to examine our beliefs about race. Furthermore, he attempts to discover whether there is anything that corresponds to these beliefs about race. The second project is normative. In this project, he asserts based on the analysis from his first project that there are no human races. He offers solutions on how to approach race, racial identity, and racism given the …