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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Impartialist Ethics And Psychic Disintegration: A Talking Cure, Roman Nakia Briggs
Impartialist Ethics And Psychic Disintegration: A Talking Cure, Roman Nakia Briggs
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation deals with integrity understood as a state of the psyche. Its primary interlocutor is Professor Bernard Williams, and its point of departure is my interpretation of his Objection from Integrity to impartialist moral theories. Against Williams, I hope to show that the active adherent of impartialist ethical systems (e.g., act utilitarianism) may retain both moral integrity and integrity. In demonstrating this, I make use of a variant of Roy Schafer’s action language approach to psychoanalysis, and what I call practical aestheticism.
On The Evolutionary Origins Of Religious Belief, Robert Duane Howard
On The Evolutionary Origins Of Religious Belief, Robert Duane Howard
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
Religious belief is a byproduct of evolutionarily designed cognitive mechanisms. The ubiquity of religious belief and experience across human cultures is explained by our common human psychology; our domain-specific cognitive mechanisms give rise, collectively, to the phenomenon of byproduct religious belief/experience. In this thesis, I will examine what I call religion-generating cognitive mechanisms, and I will argue that byproduct raw god-beliefs are developed by cultures into refined god-beliefs. These refined god-beliefs are co-opted by evolutionary processes and are cultural adaptations. My conception of “religious belief” in terms of raw and refined god-beliefs allows a disambiguation of the term “religion,” and …