Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Rite To Death, Left To Life: Death Ritual As A Cross-Cultural Unit Of Analysis, Ro M. Runkel

Young Historians Conference

Death ritual is a nearly ubiquitous aspect of life within civilization, and serves the purpose of reconciling the logical positivist societal constructions that uphold social order with the fundamentally logic-breaking nature of death. This paper posits that death ritual serves as a strong cross-cultural unit of analysis as it provides insight into the defining socio-cultural traits and spiritual outlooks of different cultures. This unit of analysis is applied to Song-era Ch’an Buddhism, pre-colonial Hindu India, and Maori death ritual. For each of these examples, death rites are connected to aspects of art, culture, social organization, and spirituality or religion, and …

Life At The Meridian: The Subjectivity Of Ethics In The Works Of Albert Camus And Friedrich Nietzsche, Clancy E. Robledo

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

This paper endeavors to respond to the questions: can ethics can be unbound from its traditional rootedness in religious systems? If so, what contributions did Nietzsche make to liberate value from the shackles of Western morality? To what degree is Camus one of the “new philosophers” Nietzsche calls for in On the Genealogy of Morals?

In an attempt to demonstrate that ethics can and do exist vividly in the realm of the non-religious, this paper will begin by illustrating the metaphysical door Nietzsche opens through his use of aphorisms in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his investigation of the history …