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Articles 1 - 27 of 27
Full-Text Articles in Religion
Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger
Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …
Numbered, Weighed, Divided: Revolution And/As Apocalypse In The Modern Liberal Tradition, Asher J. Wycoff
Numbered, Weighed, Divided: Revolution And/As Apocalypse In The Modern Liberal Tradition, Asher J. Wycoff
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
A long-standing political-theological critique contends that liberalism lacks the capacity to address theological challenges, and qualitative political challenges more generally. This charge is prevalent in our current age of crises, when the capacity to address such challenges is essential to any political tradition’s self-legitimation. I argue that the liberal tradition, broadly conceived, has long contended with theological challenges, particularly during modern revolutionary periods. Theological discourses, especially eschatological ones, circulate widely in these moments. Modern political actors impute cosmic significance to the events of their present, with a central analogy crystallizing between revolution and apocalypse. Reading major theorists of three modern …
The Storytelling Cure: Medicine And Narrative From Galen To Shahrazad And Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba
The Storytelling Cure: Medicine And Narrative From Galen To Shahrazad And Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Are stories healing? This dissertation introduces and explores an idea that I call “the storytelling cure.” With this term I capture a set of related notions about the healing power of stories that span literary studies, intellectual history, philosophy, and medical practice. Through a comparative study I make the case for “the storytelling cure” as a cross-cultural, multiconfessional, and multilingual phenomenon of great age, complexity, and power, worthy of the most sustained attention by the contemporary field of Comparative Literature. Concretely, this dissertation presents three extended case studies of “storytelling cures” from three different kinds of texts (case history, frame …
From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko
From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis analyses the dynamics of religious reform in the USSR from 1917 to 1943. It argues that the early Bolshevik policy of persecution was increasingly substituted by state co-optation. This dynamic was shaped primarily by Stalinist concerns with state security and problems of ideology.
The Incoherence Of An Evil God, Carlo Alvaro
The Incoherence Of An Evil God, Carlo Alvaro
Publications and Research
The evil god challenge is for theists to explain why a good god’s existence should be considerably more reasonable than an evil god’s existence. Challengers note that there is a symmetry between a good god and an evil god. Moreover, the classical arguments for a good god can prove the existence of an evil god just as well. Furthermore, theodicies can be mirrored by reverse theodicies. Consequently, the evil god challenge leads to two implications. One, if an evil god is deemed absurd, by logical symmetry, a good god must also be absurd. Two, if an evil god is not …
Deism Defined And Defended, Carlo Alvaro
Deism Defined And Defended, Carlo Alvaro
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing
Pierce And Pine: Diane Di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte, And The Meeting Of Matter And Spirit, Iris Cushing
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Diane di Prima (1934-2020) and Mary Norbert Korte (b. 1934) are two poets whose contributions to postwar American poetry are vitally important, and yet their status on the margins of mainstream literary culture has left their work largely unstudied. Di Prima, the granddaughter of Italian Anarchist Domenico Mallozzi (with whom she shared a close relationship) grew up in an Italian-American community in Brooklyn and bore witness to the cultural schizophrenia of WWII as a child. Korte was raised in an affluent Bay Area family, and encountered hardships (including the death of her father when she was 12) that affected her …
Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski
Intangible Cultural Heritage: A Benefit To Climate-Displaced And Host Communities, Gül Aktürk, Martha B. Lerski
Publications and Research
Climate change is borderless, and its impacts are not shared equally by all communities. It causes an imbalance between people by creating a more desirable living environment for some societies while erasing settlements and shelters of some others. Due to floods, sea level rise, destructive storms, drought, and slow-onset factors such as salinization of water and soil, people lose their lands, homes, and natural resources. Catastrophic events force people to move voluntarily or involuntarily. The relocation of communities is a debatable climate adaptation measure which requires utmost care with human rights, ethics, and psychological well-being of individuals upon the issues …
An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman
An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman
Theses and Dissertations
This thesis examines how artists, intellectuals, spiritual seekers, and industrialists represented the American horizon across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose of this inquiry is to show how art transmuted ideological and religious beliefs across time and to demonstrate the interdependence of esoteric self-perceptions and American hegemonic power.
Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon
Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon
Theses and Dissertations
This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.
Atheism As An Extreme Rejection Of Rational Evidence For The Existence Of God, Carlo Alvaro
Atheism As An Extreme Rejection Of Rational Evidence For The Existence Of God, Carlo Alvaro
Publications and Research
Explicit atheism is a philosophical position according to which belief in God is irrational and thus it should be rejected. In this paper, I revisit, extend, and defend against the most telling counter arguments the Kalām Cosmological Argument in order to show that explicit atheism must be deemed as a positively irrational position.
The Evil God Challenge: Two Significant Asymmetries, Carlo Alvaro
The Evil God Challenge: Two Significant Asymmetries, Carlo Alvaro
Publications and Research
Several authors have maintained that every argument in support of God, indeed everything that a theist claims about God, can be reversed and used in support of an evil god. The most salient example is the alleged symmetry between theodicies and reverse theodicies: God gave us free will to promote good, evil god gave us free will to promote evil; God allows evil for soul making, evil god allows good for soul destruction; our suffering is compensated for by the eternal bliss in the afterlife, our happiness is compensated for by the eternal damnation in the afterlife. Considering such symmetries, …
Digital Occult Library, Alexis Brandkamp
Digital Occult Library, Alexis Brandkamp
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This capstone project is a website, titled Digital Occult Library, hosted by the CUNY Commons and built with WordPress. The site address is:
digitaloccultlibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu
It features (in this iteration) twenty-five unique pages with information on and discussion of occult and esoteric topics. It also hosts a forum that can be accessed and utilized by anyone, not just those registered on the Commons. The purpose of the site is to inform three types of interested parties on the highlighted topics: a general audience with no current knowledge of the occult, practitioners of esoteric traditions, and academics. Not only is the …
"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma
"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This study focuses on the discovery of subjectivity through the recovery of lost paradise in Milton’s late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This theme revolves around the tension between the affective and the empirical, which also configure the spheres of the sacred and the profane. I explore how the irresistibly emancipatory impulse of recovering lost paradise compels Miltonic subjects to seek ways to return to their originary state or the divine ensemble. During this process, the subject is engaged with his own incapacity or privation while reaching into the sphere of unknown potentiality. In …
Long Vacation In Bk, Doll Chao
Long Vacation In Bk, Doll Chao
Theses and Dissertations
The diary of a transcontinental search for self and place, a journey through obtuse politics, cultural oppression, and loneliness - this film is the document of a lost generation of Taiwanese youth and its conflict with China, swirling in a transpacific gyre of sound, image, and text.
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …
Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse
Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …
If God Didn’T Satisfice, We Could Still Exist, Rick Repetti
If God Didn’T Satisfice, We Could Still Exist, Rick Repetti
Publications and Research
Theodicies of satisficing – defenses of God’s goodness that justify creating minimally satisfactory beings/worlds – originate with Robert Merrihew Adams (1972, 1979). Adams (1972) argued that in creating imperfect beings God was graceful in giving the undeserved gift of life. There have been many objections to Adams’s argument; e.g., Jerome A. Weinstock (1975) objected that God still would have been graceful in granting undeserved life to superior beings, and, among others, E. Wielenberg (2004) objected that grace doesn’t erase the imperfection of creating imperfection. However, Adams’s theodicy arguably maintains two points: (a) non-existing superior beings cannot be harmed by not …
Buddhist Meditation And The Possibility Of Free Will, Rick Repetti
Buddhist Meditation And The Possibility Of Free Will, Rick Repetti
Publications and Research
I argue that an analysis of Buddhist meditation theory and practice may be used to ground a model of the possibility of free agency that stands up against four powerful arguments for free will skepticism in contemporary analytic philosophy: Peter van Inwagen’s consequence argument, which asserts that if choices are lawfully necessary consequences of prior events, then they are unfree; Derk Pereboom’s two arguments for hard incompatibilism: the manipulation argument, which asserts that manipulated choices are unfree, determinism is functionally equivalent to manipulation, and thus determined choices are unfree; and the randomness argument, which asserts that we cannot claim authorship …
Locke's "God" Problem: Predicating God And Liberty Amid The Secularizing Effect Of "Uneasiness", Kathleen M. Ryan
Locke's "God" Problem: Predicating God And Liberty Amid The Secularizing Effect Of "Uneasiness", Kathleen M. Ryan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Notorious among philosophy texts, Locke's Essay stands between the God-intoxicated 17th century and the science-intoxicated 18th century and has had a significant role in the transition of the one intoxication to the other. That the Essay itself underwent major revisions before it emerged in the posthumous form we've canonized for our enlightenment today obscures many of the issues Locke was contending with at the time to which he may not have found the kind of final answers we've come to attribute to him. This dissertation attempts to justify an examination of one particular chapter in the Essay -- the "Of …
God And Gratuitous Evil, Michael Schrynemakers
God And Gratuitous Evil, Michael Schrynemakers
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
William Rowe has argued for atheism as follows: (1) There seem to be evils God could have prevented without losing a greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse, and (2) God would not allow such evils. This dissertation examines (2), the "No Gratuitous Evil Thesis," and its role in Rowe's argument. In Part One I argue that there are crucial ambiguities in the notion of a greater good this thesis appeals to and that these present dilemmas for Rowe's argument, as well as for defining gratuitous evil. This leads to my approximation of the notion of gratuitous …
Divine Omnipotence In Descartes' Philosophy, Alfredo Rodriguez
Divine Omnipotence In Descartes' Philosophy, Alfredo Rodriguez
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The present thesis explores various aspects of Rene Descartes' doctrine of divine omnipotence within the context of his overall philosophy and with reference to his medieval heritage. This thesis shows that, contrary to his multiple and explicit statements that God's power cannot be limited in any way, Descartes took a more nuanced position on divine omnipotence that incorporated aspects of the widely accepted medieval position that God's goodness is a constraint on his power. Furthermore, Descartes used the medieval concept of universals as he experimented with the use of modes to explain how a thing's actual existence is possible by …
Buddhist Hard Determinism: No Self, No Free Will, No Responsibility, Rick Repetti
Buddhist Hard Determinism: No Self, No Free Will, No Responsibility, Rick Repetti
Publications and Research
This is the third article in a four-article series that examines Buddhist responses to the Western philosophical problem of whether free will is compatible with “determinism,” the doctrine of universal causation. The first article (“Earlier”) focused on the first publications on this issue in the 1970s, the “early period.” The second (“Paleo-compatibilism”) and the present articles examine key responses published in the last part of the Twentieth and the first part of the Twenty-first centuries, the “middle period.” The fourth article (“Recent”) examines responses published in the last few years, the “recent period.” Whereas early-period scholars endorsed a compatibilism between …
Buddhist Reductionism And Free Will: Paleo-Compatibilism, Rick Repetti
Buddhist Reductionism And Free Will: Paleo-Compatibilism, Rick Repetti
Publications and Research
This is the second article in a four-article series that examines Buddhist responses to the Western philosophical problem of whether free will is compatible with “determinism,” the doctrine of universal causation. The first article focused on the first publications on this issue in the 1970s, the “early period”; the present article and the next examine key responses published in the last part of the Twentieth century and first part of the Twenty-first, the “middle period”; and the fourth article will examine responses published in the last few years. Whereas early-period scholars endorsed compatibilism, in the middle period the pendulum moved …
Earlier Buddhist Theories Of Free Will: Compatibilism, Rick Repetti
Earlier Buddhist Theories Of Free Will: Compatibilism, Rick Repetti
Publications and Research
This is the first part of a three-article series that examines Budd-hist accounts of free will. The present article introduces the issues and reviews earlier attempts by Frances Story, Walpola Rāhula, Luis Gómez, and David Kalupahana. These “early-period” authors advocate compatibilism between Buddhist doctrine, determinism (the doctrine of universal lawful causation), and free will. The second article reviews later attempts by Mark Siderits, Gay Watson, Joseph Goldstein, and Charles Goodman. These “middle-period” authors embrace either partial or full incompatibilism. The third article reviews recent attempts by Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg, Asaf Federman, Peter Harvey, and B. Alan Wallace. …
Las Cuestiones Sicilianas De Ibn Sab‘Īn: El Texto, Sus Fuentes Y Su Contexto Histórico, Anna Ayşe Akasoy
Las Cuestiones Sicilianas De Ibn Sab‘Īn: El Texto, Sus Fuentes Y Su Contexto Histórico, Anna Ayşe Akasoy
Publications and Research
The Sicilian Questions are the earliest pre-served text of the philosopher and Sufi Ibn Sab‘īn of Murcia (c. 614/1217-668/1270). Even though the prologue of the text claims that it is a response to questions sent by Frederick II to the Arab world, it seems more likely that it was an introductory manual for Arab students of philosophy, dealing with four specific and controversial problems as away of presenting general concepts of Aristotelian philosophy. This article analyses the structure and way of argumentation in the Sicilian Questions. Particular attention is being paid to the relationship between mysticism and philosophy and …
Orientalisms In The Interpretation Of Islamic Philosophy, Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Orientalisms In The Interpretation Of Islamic Philosophy, Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Publications and Research
The recent death of Edward Said has reignited the debate as to whether his landmark work Orientalism still has something to teach us about the study of Arab-Islamic civilization. In this article, I will argue that Saidʼs central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory role to play in our understanding of the work produced in at least one area of scholarship about the Arab and Islamic worlds, namely Arab-Islamic philosophy from the classical or medieval period. Moreover, I will claim that it continues to play this role not only for scholarship produced in the West by Western scholars but …