History Commons^™

Perversion: A Genealogy Of Deviance And Creation Of The "Other", J D. Lyell

University Honors Theses

Drawing from Thomas Aquinas' Theory of Natural Law, I investigate Euro-Christian conceptions of naturalness and unnaturalness and how they were weaponized to cast racialized groups as perverse in the construction of the United States. I focus on the enforcement of Euro-heteropatriarchy to demonize Indigenous family and gender structures, as well as the characterization of Black bodies as abnormal by white academia to demonstrate some of the ways gender and sexuality have been colonized in the U.S. My research provides a general outline tracing a genealogy of deviance as established by Euro-Christian norms of sexuality and gender, which emerges from a …

Mutual Aid As Spiritual Tacit Knowledge Within Doukhobor Epistemology, Rachel L. Neubuhr Torres

University Honors Theses

The relationship between Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit knowledge and religion is a topic that is rarely explored. Applying tacit knowledge to the study of religion and spirituality allows us to think about how we connect with the world and how we address the concern of what one feels to be true of their existence, or existential intuition. In the latter half of the 1800s the Russian prince turned anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, wrote extensively on the theory of mutually beneficial cooperation, or mutual aid, as being one of the most important factors of evolution. As Kropotkin began writing his series …

Nietzsche's "Woman" : A Metaphor Without Brakes, Kathleen Merrow

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis reconsiders the generally held view that Friedrich Nietzsche's works are misogynist. In doing so it provides an interpretation of Nietzsche's texts with respect to the metaphor "woman," sets this interpretation into an historical context of Nietzsche reception and follows the extension of Nietzsche's metaphor "woman" into French feminist theory. It provides an interpretation that shows that a misogynist reading of Nietzsche is in error because such a reading fails to consider the multiple perspectives that operate in Nietzsche's texts.

The Philosophy Of William James As Related To Charles Renouvier, Henri Bergson, Maurice Blondel And Emile Boutroux, Peggy Lyne Hurtado

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis argues two issues: William James' philosophy was-to a great extent derived from his interaction with the French philosophers, Charles Renouvier, Henri Bergson, Maurice Blondel and Emile Boutroux. Correlative to the fact that these five figures have an intellectual relationship with one another, I also argue that in order to understand James, he must be placed within the context of these relations. These five philosophers, as a group, can be clearly seen and understood in the context of an identifiable movement. Each one was a part of a whole reality with their own slightly different perspectives. However, the context …

Hegel And The Concept Of Religion In Greek Tragedy, Barbara Scot

Dissertations and Theses

A parallel can be drawn in intellectual development between ancient Greece and late eighteenth century Europe concerning the secularization of the religious myth. This parallel is illustrated in a literary mode in Greece and in a philosophical mode in Europe. In both historical situations the intellectual development of a society was posited in a delicate balance of religious mythical interpretation of human existence and in a growing assertiveness of the self-consciousness of the individual. A significant point of analogy is the similarity of the Greek tragedians’ attempt to define man in relation to the gods and Hegel’s formulation of a …

Ernst Cassirer And The Synthesis Of The Past: A Paradigm In The History Of Ideas, Mart Stewart

Dissertations and Theses

The problem of a method of historical analysis played an integral part in the scholarship of Ernst Cassirer, German philosopher and historian. An Essay on Man, the work for which he is best known in the United State, includes his most lucid discussion of the tasks and aims of the historian. The historian must reconstruct the past, infusing it with the immediacy of a living expression. "Rebirth of the past" gives man a better view of his potentialities, a freedom to see beyond the demands, characteristics, and contingencies of the moment.

This view of history and the historian's task …