Science And A Whole Person Psychology: Can Participatory Empiricism Ease The Way Forward?,
2019
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California, USA
Science And A Whole Person Psychology: Can Participatory Empiricism Ease The Way Forward?, Glenn Hartelius
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
N/A
Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Iii. Martin Heidegger’S Phenomenology Of Numinous/Being Experience And The “Other Beginning” Of A Futural Planetary Spirituality,
2019
Brock University, Ontario, Canada
Intimations Of A Spiritual New Age: Iii. Martin Heidegger’S Phenomenology Of Numinous/Being Experience And The “Other Beginning” Of A Futural Planetary Spirituality, Harry T. Hunt
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
The phenomenology of numinous or Being-experience in the later Heidegger is the focus in this third in a series of papers on a group of independent figures— also including Jung, Reich, Toynbee, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who beginning in the crisis years of the 1930s envisioned versions of a futural “New Age” spirituality to address a globalizing materialism and its disenchantments—and so also creating a context for much of contemporary transpersonal and consciousness studies. A preliminary consideration of Heidegger in the contexts of transpersonal psychology, religious studies, the macro-histories of Toynbee and Sorokin, James on “pure experience,” and spirituality …
The Castrated Gods And Their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, And Spiritual Supremacy,
2019
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California, USA
The Castrated Gods And Their Castration Cults: Revenge, Punishment, And Spiritual Supremacy, Jenny Wade
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Voluntary castration has existed as a religious practice up to the present day, openly in India and secretively in other parts of the world. Gods in a number of different cultures were castrated, a mutilation that paradoxically tended to increase rather than diminish their powers. This cross-cultural examination of the eunuch gods examines the meaning associated with divine emasculation in Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, the Roman Empire, India, and northern Europe to the degree that these meanings can be read from the wording of myths, early accounts, and the castration cults for some of these gods. Three distinct patterns of …
Meaning-Making Among Intentionally Childless Women,
2019
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California, USA
Meaning-Making Among Intentionally Childless Women, Christine Brooks
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
This paper is a summary of a qualitative research project that focused upon meaningmaking processes as described by intentionally childless women. A grounded theory exploration, it involved semi-structured interviews with 30 cisgendered women aged 27–61 who chose childlessness early in life. Based on principles inherent to social constructivism and feminist theories, the subjective voices of the participants were analyzed as normative expressions of female identity. The main category that accompanied intentional childlessness was a sense of freedom. In addition, two additional thematic categories focused on ways the women view their contributions to their communities and experience belonging and a sense …
Introduction To The Special Topic Section On Transpersonal Sexuality: Bringing Sexy Back To Transpersonal Studies,
2019
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California, USA
Introduction To The Special Topic Section On Transpersonal Sexuality: Bringing Sexy Back To Transpersonal Studies, Samuel A. Malkemus, Marie I. Thouin-Savard
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
N/A
Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon,
2019
California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California, USA
Amigeist: A New Extreme Love Phenomenon, Jeffrey Sundberg
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies
Falling in love may begin with an inescapable, uncontrollable, transformative experience of intense emotions and intrusive thoughts, such as limerence. Romantic love researchers have tended to lump extreme love into pathology. Transpersonal psychology was chosen as the lens to examine an extreme occurrence of falling in love for its transformational and spiritual potential using a phenomenological approach. Twenty-five U.S. born participants, age 30 or older, reported experiencing a highly intense and deeply significant romantic love occurrence. Results revealed a unique experience with limited correlations to limerence. The new phenomenon is called amigeist, characterized by immediate, intense soul-mate bonding, such as …
Comparative Philosophy And Decolonial Struggle: The Epistemic Injustice Of Colonization And Liberation Of Human Reason,
2019
Marquette University
Comparative Philosophy And Decolonial Struggle: The Epistemic Injustice Of Colonization And Liberation Of Human Reason, Grant J. Silva
Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications
This essay explores the extent to which comparative philosophy can assist decolonial struggle. In order to accomplish this task, I offer not only a description of philosophy's colonization but also an account of how this discipline remains subject to the coloniality of knowledge. In short, insofar as race, gender, class, and sexuality are considered irrelevant or accidental to the production of philosophical knowledge, professional philosophy replicates, if not continues, what Rajeev Bhargava terms the epistemic injustice of colonialism. One response to the colonization of philosophy is “diversification” by means of putting into conversation philosophers, systems, and ideas from differing cultures …
Darkness And Light: Absence And Presence In Heidegger, Derrida, And Daoism,
2019
Singapore Management University
Darkness And Light: Absence And Presence In Heidegger, Derrida, And Daoism, Steven Burik
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The light metaphor is a perpetual favorite for philosophers, both East and West. I seek to revaluate its opposite, darkness. I claim that there are good reasons to favor darkness over light, or at least to not see them as mutually incompatible or in hierarchical fashion. In recent Western philosophy, both Heidegger and Derrida argue that what the light metaphor represents, the promise of clarity and objectivity, is exactly what makes Western metaphysics problematic. In Chinese philosophy, classical Daoism offers a thinking that does not favor the light metaphor over its opposite. Daoists have the good sense to acknowledge darkness …
Revolutionary Affinities: Democracy And Revolution In Hannah Arendt’S Portrait Of Rosa Luxemburg,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Revolutionary Affinities: Democracy And Revolution In Hannah Arendt’S Portrait Of Rosa Luxemburg, Matthew P. Finck
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This work is an exploration of Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Rosa Luxemburg. Beginning with a few minor discussions of Luxemburg in her first major work Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the socialist revolutionary’s place in the constellation of figures that appear in Arendt’s work grew over the course of her career. Arendt’s portrait of Luxemburg culminated in “A Heroine of Revolution,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books, and in Men in Dark Times (1968). Yet Arendt’s portrait of Luxemburg was notable for its excision of her revolutionary Marxism in the process of sculpting Luxemburg into …
Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …
Mentality And Fundamentality,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Mentality And Fundamentality, Christopher D. Brown
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Extant well-considered problems with physicalism primarily come from two sources: philosophers of mind arguing that subjective experience does not fit into a physicalist world-picture, and metaphysicians trying to figure out the particular commitments of the view. I examine the thesis of physicalism in order to produce a clearer notion of the physical and to help straighten out physicalism’s entailments, while simultaneously providing a strategy for physicalists to sidestep well known anti-physicalist arguments concerning consciousness. This involves both a critical and a positive effort: on the critical side, I expose an issue with a popular way of understanding physicalism called “via …
A Volitional Theory Of Aesthetic Value,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
A Volitional Theory Of Aesthetic Value, John Dyck
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this dissertation, I defend a volitionalist theory of aesthetic value. The volitionalist theory is a species of response-based models of aesthetic value: It holds that aesthetic value is based in a kind of human response. Traditional response-based theories of aesthetic value hold that value is based in responses of cognition, perception, desire, or pleasure. The volitional theory offers a new response as the home of aesthetic value: the will. We find things beautiful, I argue, because we orient our selves towards them; we find things ugly, I argue, because we orient our selves against them. The volitionalist theory I …
How Racial Injustice Causes Ignorance,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
How Racial Injustice Causes Ignorance, Eric Bayruns
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
According to a (Jones and Saad) 2016 Gallup poll 69% of US whites and 32% of US blacks believe that blacks and whites have equal opportunity in the US job market. Much ink has been spilt showing that this belief is false (Alcoff 2015; Anderson 2010; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2003; Fricker 2007; McConahay 1983; Mills 1997; Mills 2007; Stanley 2015). But if its falsity is well publicized, then why do so many people persist in believing this falsehood? In this dissertation, I argue that racial injustice and whites’ current dominant-group status explains why such a high percentage of people in …
Some Non-Human Languages Of Thought,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Some Non-Human Languages Of Thought, Nicolas J. Porot
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
What might we learn if we take seriously the possibility of non-human Languages of Thought (LoT)? A LoT is a combinatorial set of mental representations. And, since mental representations and rules of combination vary in kind, there are many possible LoTs. Simple LoTs might lack familiar features of the putative human LoT, such as object representations, recursively defined rules of combination, sentential connectives, or predicate-argument structure. The most familiar arguments for the existence of LoTs, such as those from productivity, systematicity, concept learning, and perceptual computation, all fail when applied to non-human animals. But recent empirical evidence motivates attributing LoTs …
The Origin Of Power In The Need To Cooperate: Parallels Between Political And Economic Power,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
The Origin Of Power In The Need To Cooperate: Parallels Between Political And Economic Power, David Nagy
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this essay, I argue that the power structures in both states and firms should be the same—for example, if state authorities are chosen via a democratic process, the same should hold for authorities in firms. This is because the source of power is the same in both realms, namely, economic and political power derives from its ability to facilitate cooperation. Hence, there is no plausible reason to defend a different power structure for states and firms. To argue this, I start in Chapter 1 by arguing against the most common theory of state power, which is that it …
Exploring Political Action And Socialization Through Group Improvisation Within The Music Of Frederic Rzewski And Cornelius Cardew,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Exploring Political Action And Socialization Through Group Improvisation Within The Music Of Frederic Rzewski And Cornelius Cardew, Marcel Rominger
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In the late 1960s, socialist composers, Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, each established ensembles with the purpose of performing works consisting of experimental forms of improvisation. By employing group improvisation, and including untrained, non-musicians within their performances, they strove to use these ensembles as a model for society itself; this model includes a dissolution of the hierarchy among performers and the barrier between performer and audience. Improvisation helped music resist commodification by the culture industry or appropriation by authoritarian regimes for the purpose of propaganda. This dissertation aims to explore how Cardew and Rzewski constituted effective socialization and political action …
What Rome Really Adopted From Ancient Greece,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
What Rome Really Adopted From Ancient Greece, Christian J. Vella
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
The Roman conquest of the Greek city-states and the appropriation of many aspects of its culture, especially architecture and art, is well known. But what of the many great philosophies that began in the various city-states of Ancient Greece? This piece is made in attempt to answer this question. The scope of these sources will start with the beginning of the Western Philosophical Tradition, with Thales of Miletus and the Milesian, all the way up to, but not including, the foundation of the Christian Philosophical Tradition. After the year 146 BC if a philosopher is born in a Greek-City state, …
Intention And Interpretation In Law,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Intention And Interpretation In Law, Cosim J. Sayid
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
I provide a Gricean theory of communication to constitutively explain the basis of duties, immunities, powers, privileges, and rights – the legal profile– possessed by actors within a legal system in virtue of their legally authoritative communicative intentions. This allows me to clearly speak to what is communicated between legal agents and how to interpret – how to figure out – that content, using available evidence. That account is then applied to statutory interpretation and contract law. Using a notion I call creative interpretation, which I develop by analogy to some species of literary and musical interpretation, I …
Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World,
2019
CUNY Graduate Center
Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation explores multiple ways philanthropy builds and undermines the common world. Political science treatments of philanthropy have focused mainly on its role in the development of civil society, with a recent turn towards critiques of philanthropy as an instrument of elite power and tension between private wealth and democratic governance. In this dissertation, I examine how philanthropy can foster enduring spaces of human flourishing, or reduce beneficiaries to objects of pity, surveillance and domination. I trace philanthropy's evolution from ancient to contemporary contexts and propose a framework for philanthropy to, under certain conditions, build and care for the common …
Living Like A Dog: Can The Life Of Non-Human Animals Be Meaningful?,
2019
University of Liverpool
Living Like A Dog: Can The Life Of Non-Human Animals Be Meaningful?, Michael Hauskeller
Between the Species
Most philosophers addressing the issue of meaning in life seem to think that non-human animals cannot have a meaningful life because only humans have what it takes to do so. In this paper, I discuss three prominent philosophical theories of meaning in life, all of which implicitly or explicitly deny non-human animals the possibility of living a meaningful life. I will argue that none of them is convincing and that we should embrace a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of meaning in life that allows for non-human lives to be meaningful and in their own right worth living.
