Nicholas Trevet's and Thomas Waleys's commentaries on De civitate Dei are neglected works which provide valuable perspectives on attitudes to classical antiquity on the cusp of the Renaissance. The only existing study which pays more than cursory attention to these commentaries is Beryl Smalley's English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (1960). There they are discussed among the moralising biblical commentaries and preaching aids of the English classicising friars. Although Smalley recognised that the friars' work seemed to challenge the received understanding of medieval learning and the Renaissance, her assumptions about their critical method prevented her from fully recognising the commentaries' most innovative aspects. Recent debates about the definition and significance of Italian humanism, as well as fresh insights into scholastic exposition of the Latin Classics, biblical exegesis and encyclopaedic writing call for a reassessment of Trevet's and Waleys's commentaries and attitUdes to classical antiquity. Contrary to common belief, the commentaries share none of the dogmatic tone or moralising exegesis of contemporary classicising biblical commentaries and preaching aids. Instead they are pre-dominantly literal in their exposition. They show a sensitivity to historical difference and the periodisation of Roman history, and take an even-handed approach to Christian and pagan authors. Their interest in social history and the collapse of the Roman Republic is driven by an awareness of their sources' contemporary political resonance. Nonetheless, their critical method is strictly historicist and manifests characteristics which modern Renaissance scholars continue to prize as humanist innovations. Trevet's and Waleys's expositions of De civitate Dei bear witness to the range of approaches to antiquity which have recently been emphasised by revisionist scholars of the Renaissance. Their commentaries, however, demonstrate that such approaches did not originate or develop in isolation, and that there were never entirely separate spheres of activity, as scholars of this period navigated across institutional and corporate boundaries. The friars' commentaries and their reception indicate that it is a mistake to draw too sharp a distinction between humanist and more established forms of learning, and testify to the continued vitality of intellectual life in late medieval universities and religious communities.

"The Trinity and the Vindication of Christian Paradox" grapples with the question of how to honor theological system, apologetic proof, and genuine Christian paradox by building on the. in sights of Dr. Cornelius Van Til. Van Til developed an apologetic where one presupposes that the Triune God exists and has spoken authoritatively in Scripture, and then proves this Christian presupposition by demonstrating that the anti-Christian alternative is self-defeating in the specific sense that it betrays reliance on principles that only the Triune God, as a perfect harmony between unity and diversity, can furnish. Van Til deflects the criticism that theological paradoxes render Christianity self-defeating by arguing that although they cannot be resolved, they can be vindicated as true. Vindication involves showing that the opposing features of a paradox discernibly necessitate one another, and together perform an indispensable function to the Christian system. Yet, Van Til fails to thoroughly vindicate the Trinity by showing that the self-sufficient unity of God requires that he should be specifically tri-personal rather than generically multi-personal. Likewise, subsequent Van Tillians have failed to develop systematic vindications of Christian paradoxes according to the method so described. In an effort to overcome these shortcomings, this thesis supplies a demonstration that God's status as (a) his own source of self-distinction, and (b) his own personal context necessitates that he must be three, and only three persons, in order to be a self-sufficient unity. Our conclusion about the Trinity is necessitated by the covenantal perspective that permeates Scripture. And the Trinity in return is proven to be foundational for a covenantal worldview. This initial vindication of the Trinity supplies a refined vision of the Christian worldview in light of which other prominent Christian paradoxes are vindicated in systematic Succession, and variations on the anti-Christian perspective are dispelled as genuine contradictions.

This work studies dialogue, argumentation, and their relationship to belief revision in person-to-person apologetics in five West Cameroonian dialogues. The seeming irrelevance of Western Apologetics to West Cameroonian thought is the problem that stimulated the study. The primary methodological steps of the study include obtaining meticulously transcribed scripts of unrehearsed conversations, and subjecting those transcripts to an inquiry about the presence and nature of dialogue, argument patterns, commitment, questions, rhetoric, and belief revision in the conversations. These primary tools are drawn from Commitment in Dialogue (1995), Argumentation Schemes (2008), ‘A Truth Maintenance System’ (1979), ‘Reason Maintenance and Belief Revision’ (1992), and related sources. The initial premise, to be tested by the research, is that these conversational elements are present, and that the theories are useful in understanding the dialogues’ rationality. The second, but no less important, premise of the study is that this research contributes to an understanding of the nature and role of the cumulative case in the practice of person-to-person apologetics in West Cameroon and cultural situations dominated by relativism. Chapter 1 introduces the background of the research and the questions of the inquiry, which I call ‘tools’. Chapter 2 questions the significance of the tools and the analysis of the data for person-to-person apologetics in pluralistic contexts. Chapters 3-7 document the analysis of the dialogues. And chapter 8 ends with a summary of the evidence for the thesis of the work: ‘A belief’s entrenchment, the result of argument patterns converging into a cumulative case for the belief, is primarily sensitive to understanding and revision in the context of dialogue.’ This work contributes to the understanding of modern African rationality, and the relationships of dialogue, argument, belief revision, and the cumulative case in relativistic contexts.

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This thesis investigates the reformation of Christian apologetics in the theology of the twentieth century German theologian, Helmut Thielicke. In his view, traditional apologetics—the historical methods of philosophical proof and evidentialism—is practised in a sub-theological way. His theological lifework is to take over the task of apologetics in order to conduct Christian conversation in a “new way” and at a “theologically genuine level,” as he states it. Thielicke's work sets itself to address what he considers to be the three problematic characteristics of traditional apologetics. First, it speaks to unbelievers from an unrealistic and Christianly inappropriate position of rational certainty instead of the authenticate position of faith-crisis (Anfechtung). Second, it removes the scandal and folly of the cross, and attempts to demonstrate the faith on the supposedly common ground of autonomous empiricism and rationalism. Third, it operates in a defensive answer-giving role rather than an offensive counterquestion mode which challenges the interpretive paradigms of unbelief as such. Thielicke looks to circumvent these faulty features where he discovers a new way of Christian persuasion, that is, a table-turning strategy modeled after Christ's conversations. This method coheres with a theological account of the faith-crisis element in the “theology of the cross.” The counterquestion approach integrates the counterdemonstrationism of the cross-centered theology which repudiates the allegedly neutral systems of autonomous science and philosophy. Simply put, he seeks a method that conforms to its own message. Finally, this presentation of Thielicke's apologetic reformation puts him in conversation with Cornelius Van Til, the pioneer of presuppositionalism, in order to consider Thielicke's contribution to developing contemporary Reformed apologetics.

Based on the observation that “interdisciplinarity” is the essential nature of C. S. Lewis’s religious narratives created by twofold enterprise—imaginative writing and Christian apologetics, this thesis aims to undertake a comprehensive reception of Lewis’s works by considering carefully the inter-mixture of literary art and Christian apologetics within the texts and the relevance of the reader’s role to the textual experience. In other words, the whole study is oriented to combine literary analysis, apologetic reading and “hermeneutical” reflection upon the encounter between reader and text. The purpose in general is to demonstrate that Lewis’s literary world remains artistically engaging, religiously meaningful and existentially significant to the readers beyond his time. The main part of the thesis presents a practice of close reading and multi-faceted discussion of five texts of Lewis, including: The Pilgrim’s Regress (an allegorical account of a modern man’s conversion), The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce (theological fantasies concerning interaction between subjective being and objective reality), Till We Have Faces (a mythic novel about the correlation between self-knowledge and religious experience), and A Grief Observed (a first-person narrative of an inward journey of coming to terms with grief and faith). Varied in literary modes of expression, these texts are read in terms of one common theme about the inter-related problem of faith and self. More specifically, they are treated as works of “literary apologetics”—written to manifest and tackle in an “existentialist” manner the alienated or disrupted relationship between the human self and religious / Christian faith. In the concluding section, the discussion is moved from interpreting the texts to revisiting C. S. Lewis’s mind and rethinking the proper mindset for Lewis’s readers. This part of the discussion is intended firstly to re-estimate the enterprise of C. S. Lewis as a Christian thinker and literary writer through connecting and comparing his ways of thinking and reading with contemporary theologians and hermeneutical thinkers, particularly Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Such association between Lewis and the contemporary trends of hermeneutics leads to the conclusion that C. S. Lewis is indeed an intellectually defensible thinker as well as literary figure in and even beyond his time. Moreover, it helps to fulfill the second objective of this final discussion, which is also the chief goal of the whole thesis, namely, to shed light on an appropriate way of reading C. S. Lewis. Methodologically, this research is done on a cross-disciplinary basis in terms of a multiplicity of theoretical ideas concerning such topics as literary tropes, figures of speech, the psychology of religion, literary theory and (Kierkegaard’s) existentialist philosophy of irony, and hermeneutics. Illuminated by these miscellaneous tools of interpretation, the whole research looks to attest to the claim that the genuine experience of Lewis’s texts is not gained through simply appreciating the art of expression or digging out the underlying ideas of Christian apologetics, nor does it rest upon the response of the reader alone, but must rely on the co-working and interplay of all these three aspects of experience.

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Unidad de práctica para optar al título de Químico Farmacéutico / No autorizada por el autor para ser publicada a texto completo en el Portal de Tesis Electrónicas / La práctica prolongada fue realizada en los Departamentos de Desarrollo y de Control de Calidad de Laboratorio Petrizzio S.A. En el Departamento de Desarrollo se efectuaron registros de productos cosméticos como bronceadores, crema antiarrugas, brillo labial, sombra y lápices delineadores de ojos y labios, entre otros. Además, se realizaron modificaciones de registros de productos cosméticos, que se centraron en el cambio de fórmulas y cambio de especificaciones de producto terminado, y se inscribieron productos de higiene y odorizantes. En el laboratorio de control de calidad se realizaron estudios de estabilidad para determinar el período de vida útil de numerosos productos, ya que la nueva reglamentación exige presentar la vigencia de todo producto ante cualquier registro nuevo o modificación de registro, y también rotularla en el envase del producto. Se efectuaron estudios de estantería, para productos antiguos, y de estabilidad acelerada para productos nuevos. En conjunto con las actividades mencionadas, se realizó un análisis del nuevo reglamento de cosméticos, Reglamento del Sistema Nacional de Control de Cosméticos, DS 239/02, mediante la comparación con el anterior reglamento. Además, se discutió cuáles son las ventajas y desventajas que presenta y cuál es el rol que le cabe al profesional Químico Farmacéutico con las modificaciones que trae consigo este reglamento. En términos generales, el nuevo Reglamento es un aporte al mundo de la cosmética, ya que contempla normas más específicas para los productos cosméticos y permite la agilización de los trámites para registrarlos. Sin embargo, al ser menos restrictivo que el anterior Reglamento, se pierde control sobre los productos cosméticos y se traspasa esta responsabilidad a las empresas que los fabrican y/o distribuyen, por lo tanto, es ahí donde el profesional Químico Farmacéutico debe tener mayor conciencia de su propia responsabilidad para hacer cumplir el Reglamento y asegurar así la calidad de los productos cosméticos y la salud de la población

Harrison E. Rowe. / "October 24, 1952." "This report is based on a portion of a thesis submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering ... for the degree of Doctor of Science, October 1952." / Bibliography: p. 45. / Army Signal Corps Contract DA36-039 sc-42607 Project 102B Dept. of the Army Project 3-99-10-022