Philosophy Commons^™

How Is The Christian Virtue Of Detachment Epistemically Transformative?, Simon C. Summers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to understand how the Christian virtue of detachment, understood as the proper ordering of one’s desires toward God, contributes to epistemic transformation. In order to achieve this result, I rely on the work of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, beginning by mapping out his conception of detachment and demonstrating how it helps one to overcome competing desires and find their true self. Following this, I offer an account of the type of epistemic transformation required to access some theistic knowledge in order to connect Merton’s views on the topic with those of modern-day philosophers and show the …

Becoming Stewards Of Attention: A Theological Appeal, Joshua Gorenflo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The widespread compromising of attention currently taking place in our digital age is, at least in part, a theological issue necessitating a theological response, which invites an examination of the human person in relation to God. Familiar within the biblical narrative and throughout Christian tradition, I suggest that when the role of steward functions as the operative paradigm for humans, the claims made upon their lives have profound implications for attending within the digital age. More specifically, the steward’s attention becomes a tangible expression of authority and accountability in representation of God’s image to the rest of creation. In pursuit …

The Martyr’S Desire: Levinas, Girard, And Infinite Responsibility, Joshua Alan Lawrence

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Perhaps the whole of human history could be summed up with one word: economy. The law of the home and the home of all law. Without fail, this situation results in a structured devotion that must decide what to do with desire. And the economic decision often follows a violent trajectory, most commonly described as sacrifice. Today, states will make efforts to conceal this underlying logic, but the insidious configurations of ‘real politik’ usually surface with a frightening intensity.

My project considers these problematic vestiges through Emmanuel Levinas’s reconfiguration of subjectivity. To address these bio-historical realities, my work highlights the …

The Influence Of Thomas Aquinas’ Concept Of Createdness On Josef Pieper’S Moral Philosophy, Sarah Slater

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Josef Pieper’s practical moral philosophy can be best understood by reference to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, and specifically Aquinas’ concept of the created human person. Pieper uses Aquinas’ theological anthropology to argue for three actions which respond to the reality of being created: giving assent to having been brought into existence by God, perceiving God and created reality, and pursuing of the end of human life through the practice of the virtues in order to receive beatitude. Pieper’s well-known works on the seven virtues, on leisure, and on festivity rely on the same concepts from Aquinas which Pieper examines …

Do Muslims And Christians Worship The Same God: A Philosophical Approach, Zachary W. Casey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis I probe the question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God primarily through the discipline of philosophy of language. Though a multifaceted question at its core (e.g., theological, historical), the question directly ties into how language operates in relation to God. That is, the ways in which Muslims and Christians make predications of God have a significant role in delineating whether they worship the same God. By working from the perspective of predication, I argue that Muslims and Christians refer to but do not worship the same God. In this sense, Muslims and Christians refer …

An Actor's Process In Bridging The Gap Between First-Generation And Multi-Generational African-American Identities., Mutiyat Ade-Salu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reflects my process assimilating into the role of Chelle in the production of Detroit '67 at the University of Louisville. Although there have been instances of actors crossing lines of gender, nationality, race, and even sexuality, to perform roles in contemporary theatre, discussion about generational differences is almost non-existent. Through historical research, first-hand interviews, and conventional acting methods, I explore the world of my role, searching for spirituality, authenticity, and identity. Additionally, I explain my use of The WAY Method ®, a process I began creating in 2014 to help actors be clear with who they are before …

Nine Stories And The Society Of The Spectacle: An Exploration Into The Alienation Of The Individual In The Post-War Era, Margaret E. Geddy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the thematic links between three of J. D. Salinger’s short stories published in Nine Stories (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “Teddy”), ultimately arguing that it is a short-story cycle rooted in the quandary posed by the suicide of Seymour Glass. This conclusion is reached by assessing the influence of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” on these stories, something that is understood through the Marxist frame of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle.

Wholeheartedness And Acquaintance With God, Sarah Naomi Dannemiller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I demonstrate that wholeheartedness is a constitutive intellectual virtue. Wholeheartedness consists of a definite and unified volitional structure in which one’s desires are integrated around union with God and which contributes to one’s personal intellectual worth by positively orienting her toward acquaintance with God. Since wholeheartedness consists of a hierarchy of the will that prioritizes a desire for union with God, wholeheartedness aims towards the epistemic good of acquaintance. By desiring that one have a will that wills union with God, she cooperates with God toward wholeheartedness. As one becomes aware of her volitional structure changing, she …

Divine Simplicity As A Necessary Condition For Affirming Creation Ex Nihilo, Chance Juliano

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Proponents of the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) have frequently argued that God must lack any temporal, physical, or metaphysical composition on the grounds that God’s existence would be dependent upon God’s parts. This avenue of discourse has been tried and trod so often that most detractors of DDS find it insufficient to demonstrate DDS. Additionally, objectors to DDS have often rejected the doctrine on the count of the heap of metaphysical (often Aristotelian or Neoplatonist) assumptions that one must make before one can even arrive at DDS. Within this essay I will offer an argument for DDS that is …

Unpresentable Members: The Theology And Radical Phenomenology Of The Sexual Flesh, Justin Pearl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unpresentable Members begins with a wager: that a proper account of the flesh and its sexual character may not only prove philosophically fertile within its own limited domain, but may also provide insight into the theological question of the proper role and place of gender and sexual difference within communities, particularly Christian religious communities. In this regard, this dissertation has two distinct goals: one phenomenological and one theological. Phenomenologically, it offers an account of the manifestation of concrete sexual determinations not only as they objectively appear across the “body-object” (Körper, le corps) but with equal importance as …

Explaining The Obvious: Privileged Hermeneutics And The Irony Of Explicitly Literal Interpretation, Joshua Alkire

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine why so many uses of the word literal (whether taken from everyday contemporary speech or the works of well-respected ancient writers) seem at odds with the word’s theoretical definition and to explore the implications of this disparity for those who privilege a literal interpretation of Scripture. The examples will show that the meaning of literal was not altered at a particular point in time, nor is it altered on an ongoing basis by a small subset of particularly idiosyncratic individuals. Rather, the word is predisposed to behave strangely the moment it is …

Communication Ethics: Ellul's Complexity Of Form, Marianne Pabis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to enlarge understanding of Ellul’s dilemma of the ethical Christian communicator through a hermeneutic exploration of his intentionally un-paradigmatic treatment of technology as the determining factor in the formation of contemporary structural realities, a claim central to Ellul’s theory of technological society. It attends to the question of why, over the course of more than 50 books and over 1,000 articles, Ellul has refused to expound upon this claim as an overarching theoretical construct. As a contribution to the field of communication ethics from Ellul’s Christocentric perspective, this work also explicates the importance of what has become …

Catholic Literary Theory: The Conditional Existentialism Of Four Protagonists And Their Creators, Jacob Patrick Pride

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to Catholic literary theory, the novelist, like the Divine Mystery to a certain extent, creates her characters freely and free with the possibility and probability that they may speak against their creator and even finally rebel. This dissertation reflects upon the relative infiniteness of four literary authors - Flannery O'Connor, Mary McCarthy, Walker Percy, and Cormac McCarthy. In the three novels and one imaginative memoir considered in particular, these authors create their existentialist protagonists, who in their turn reflect the conditional existentialism of their creators. This dissertation, thus, seeks to resurrect, with modern sensibilities, the pre-renaissance and renaissance commonplace …

Cognitive And Emotional Processes Involved In The Experience Of Objects As Holy Or Transcendent, Lotte J. Pummerer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, attitudes about religion/spirituality have become more pluralistic (Pew Research Center, 2015a). At the same time, the number of individuals who identify themselves as nonreligious, atheist or agnostic are growing (Pew Research Center, 2015b), yet we are lacking words and research to describe their attributions of transcendence in language not bound to religious concepts. This study aims at examining both concepts – holiness and transcendence – in their similarities and differences through assessing cognitive and emotional processes involved in experiences of objects.

The study consisted of two parts with a total of 206 Christian and 52 nonreligious/atheistic/agnostic participants. …

Epistemology In The Churches Of Christ: An Analysis And Critique Of Thomas B. Warren, Derek Estes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis seeks to understand at least one prevalent religious epistemology in the Churches of Christ by exploring the work of Thomas B. Warren. To accomplish this goal, I first offer a descriptive analysis of Warren’s theory of knowledge followed by an assessment of its strong and weak points. Ultimately finding his epistemology unsatisfying, I conclude the thesis by highlighting recent developments in religious epistemology that might point the way forward in accounting for knowledge of God in a theologically and philosophically robust way.

The Indwelling Of The Holy Spirit And Human Intentionality: A Constructive Proposal, John R. Kern

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How does the Holy Spirit, by indwelling believers, guide them to act in ways that contribute to their spiritual progress? In this thesis, I will argue that, by indwelling believers, the Spirit redirects their intentionality towards their ultimate end in union with God, thus placing believers in the best possible position for acting in ways that contribute to that end. If the Spirit guides believers in the spiritual life on a day-to-day basis, then such guidance must connect with the actual processes by which humans generally act (especially intentions). Thus, by exploring the indwelling of the Spirit, grace, and human …

The Limits Of Human Flourishing: Reconstructing Theological Anthropology In Light Of Cognitive Disability, David N. Scott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The concept of human flourishing currently holds a position of prominence within Christian theology. Numerous theologies assert that a person enjoys the fullness of humanity, not through conformity to an essential nature, but through being a living demonstration of what human being can become. This approach to theological anthropology has proven especially useful for advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups. Nevertheless, because this approach identifies human being with the capacity for purposive agency, it remains incapable of affirming the full humanity of persons with profound cognitive disabilities. These persons lack abilities that purposive agency presupposes, such as self-representation, language, and …

The Entanglement Of Anzaldúan Materiality As Bodily Knowing: Matter, Meaning, And Interrelatedness, Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project weaves together the theoretically rich and diverse work of ancient materialist philosophers, modern philosophy which advanced a theory of monism, and contemporary philosophies that further extends monism into new terrain, including 'new materialism.' While monism is a strand of this project, the core features of this project are materiality and bodies; these two concepts create the particular entanglement and central thrust of this project, which is becoming. While this project is conceptually organized around matter and bodies, and a particular notion of becoming traced from ancient through contemporary thought, this project, also, introduces the importance of Gloria Anzaldúa …

Deification, Friendship, And Self-Knowledge, Matthew Hale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How does human friendship contribute to the process of deification? In this thesis, I will argue that a kind of “spiritual friendship” contributes to the process of deification by placing the human agent in a better position for acquiring self-knowledge, and avoiding false beliefs or misunderstandings about the self. This acquisition of self-knowledge is an important part of the deification process, which involves not just a moral and ontological transformation, but an epistemological one as well.

“Fall” And Redemption In The Thought Of Martin Heidegger And Jacques Lacan, Tyler Akers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines and develops Martin Heidegger’s concept of “falling” as a significant historical-philosophical principle. Falling, however, is primarily understood as a concept of the early Heidegger, whereas I argue that Heidegger continues to rely upon it, both explicitly and implicitly, throughout his career. Falling is a description of philosophical and Western history, known as metaphysics, and the description of man’s relationship to Being. Thus, falling relates to the most significant streams in Heidegger’s later thought, too, including the truth of Being, the death of God, the gods, the overcoming of metaphysics, and meditative thinking.

I then reinterpret the traditional …

Sense-Making Bodies: Feminist Materiality And Phenomenology In Constructive Body Theologies, Heike Peckruhn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Constructive body theology provides an ethical commitment to and a set of analytical principles for understanding bodily experience. If we insist upon the theological value of embodied experience, how can we give an adequate account of it? Are feminist appeals to the senses useful in developing theological truth claims based in embodied experiences? Feminist theologies which explicitly seek to overcome body/mind dualisms often reinscribe them when they neglect to attend to perception as a critical element of bodily experience. Phenomenological analyses of perception (such as suggested by Merleau-Ponty) strengthen and refine our conception of embodiment. Grounding constructive theology in experience …

Imagination, Religious Practice, And World Transformations: Sophia, Heidegger, And Jacob Bohme's The Way To Christ, Mark Allen Peckler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is offered as a work of original scholarship in the field of Religion and Psychological Studies (RPS). Through its hermeneutic preservation of Jacob Böhme's The Way to Christ in "conversation" with selected works of Martin Heidegger, I retrieve the question of imagination's relation to religious practice, attending to potentials for world transformations disclosed through this relationship, in order to develop a new hermeneutic option for the RPS field concerning this important question. This new hermeneutic option is developed in such a way as to ensure a subversive compatibility with psychoanalytic hermeneutics—our field's koiné—while opening to certain radical …

Religious Experience In The Light Of Current Psychology., Elwyn Judson Trueblood 1896-1963

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Psychology is receiving a new emphasis in the modern age. The subject of human consciousness, always fascinating, is now claiming our attention as never before. When we endeavor to link psychology with religion, the charm is greatly increased; for then we are dealing with two themes, rather than one, in which mankind has an abiding interest -- the human consciousness and the human soul. Thus, the psychology of religion has grown to be one of the most popular studies of our generation. Indeed, an eminent authority in this field ventures the opinion that the theoretical as well as the practical …