This thesis intends to assess various inspirations of Czech art of the nineteenth, mainly twentieth century by ancient Greek tradition. Special emphasis is given to following two viewpoints: travelling on the one side and body and physicallity on the other. The first part concerns itself with artists travelling south to discover new impulses for their work, the second one deals with various approaches to body and physicallity inspired by Greek art. The didactic section presents an application of these topics to the elementary school Art Education. The practical part consists of two series of photos describing the subjective view of the present Greek metropolis.

This study focuses on the novels of Quicksand by Nella Larsen and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison to explore the phenomenon of poqéakh (פֹּקֵחַ) through the fictionalized lived experiences of their protagonists, Helga Crane and invisible man. Each novelist’s representation of poqéakh offers a portrait of the protagonists’ psyches. The narratives reveal an unsettling truth for the protagonists, who are members of a population often targeted, stigmatized, and fashioned or re-fashioned by Americans and various environs in American society, that they must assimilate—not only their bodies, but their psyches too to fit the “white man’s pattern” (Larsen 4). Their realities inform them that non-conformity and/or developing or utilizing their intellect is disadvantageous—perceiving is unfavorable. Each protagonist learns that she and he will not only be limited by their imaginations or abilities, but also by persons and constructs within American society keeping them witless and amenable. The environs presented in forms such as schools, jobs, even people who prepare each protagonist to accept all and any disparity (inequality and inequity), they are made to be persistently and surreptitiously instructive. As such, these environs are always educating (or training), always molding the psyches of the protagonists to live within a frame—the construct (American society). These ever informing boundaries thoroughly acquaint each protagonist on “how to scale down [their] desires and dreams so that they will come within reach of possibility” (Thurman 115). Poqéakh leads Helga Crane to perceive the boundaries while it prevents the invisible man from returning to unblissful ignorance, thus, for him, providing momentary periods of lucidity. This study utilizes a qualitative research design and method, and relies on phenomenological theory to successfully analyze the novels and explicate on the representations of poqéakh. As this study will illustrate, Larsen and Ellison offer as representative via their novels two narratives of the diasporic psyche (mind), wherein their protagonists’ experiences of poqéakh lead to some unmitigated facts and disturbing truths about their reality.

[pt] Fílon de Alexandria, filósofo judeu do século I, surge como o primeiro pensador a tentar conciliar o conteúdo bíblico à tradição filosófica ocidental. Neste sentido, é mais conhecido por sua doutrina do Logos, sobre a qual ainda se encontram à espera de solução inúmeras controvérsias. Esta Dissertação assume a tarefa de investigar as acepções desse Logos na obra de Fílon, abordando suas relações com a tradição filosófica e com as fontes judaicas. Considera-se sua importância para teologia cristã posterior e o papel da tradição filosófica, sobretudo do platonismo e do estoicismo, na formulação da doutrina do Logos. No entanto, o pensamento filoniano ainda se mostra original e marcado por contribuições alheias à cultura helênica, a saber, judaicas. Esta combinação tem por resultado instigantes reflexões acerca de questões metafísicas, teológicas, éticas e epistemológicas da maior relevância, revelando Fílon como pensador de grande importância na História da Filosofia, pelo que a Dissertação pretende resgatar inúmeras questões que, ao que parece, ainda hoje não foram adequadamente respondidas. Também são questionados o próprio papel da filosofia na busca humana pela sabedoria e o da fé na obtenção da virtude. No que diz respeito especificamente ao Logos filoniano, ele é a ação de Deus no mundo, o instrumento da Criação, modelo do mundo e imagem de Deus, a Palavra reveladora e o único meio a partir do qual a alma humana adquire o conhecimento verdadeiro, que vem do conhecimento de Deus. Esta faculdade, porém, não pertence ao homem senão como dom divino, como graça. / [en] Philo of Alexandria, a first century Jewish philosopher, appears as the first thinker who tried to conciliate biblical contents and western philosophical tradition. In this way, he is better known by his Doctrine of the Logos, about which many controversies are still waiting to be solved. This Dissertation claims the task to examine the meanings of that Logos in Philos works, dealing with its connections to philosophical tradition and Jewish sources as well. We pay regard to its significance to Christian theology and to the role played by philosophical tradition, especially by Platonism as by Stoicism. Otherwise, the Philos thinking still shows itself original and marked by contributions external to the hellenistic culture: Jewish ones. This combination has, by result, provocative ideas on most important metaphysical, theological, ethical and epistemological questions, revealing Philo as a very weighty thinker in the History of Philosophy. For this, the Dissertation aims to restore many questions that we see not yet properly answered. Also questioned are the role played by philosophy in the human search for wisdom and the role played by faith in the attainment of virtue. More strictly concerning philonic Logos, it means Gods action in the world, an instrument for Creation, pattern and example for the world and Gods image, the revealing Word and the sole way by which human soul acquires true knowledge, that comes from the knowledge of God. This power does not belongs to man, but its a gift from God, a grace.

This dissertation is a study of appetite in Plato’s Timaeus, Republic and Phaedrus. In recent research is it often suggested that Plato considers appetite (i) to pertain to the essential needs of the body, (ii) to relate to a distinct set of objects, e.g. food or drink, and (iii) to cause behaviour aiming at sensory pleasure. Exploring how the notion of appetite, directly and indirectly, connects with Plato’s other purposes in these dialogues, this dissertation sets out to evaluate these ideas. By asking, and answering, three philosophically and interpretatively crucial questions, individually linked to the arguments of the dialogues, this thesis aims to show (i) that the relationship between appetite and the body is not a matter of survival, and that appetite is better understood in terms of excess; (ii) that appetite is multiform and cannot be defined in terms of a distinct set of objects; and (iii) that appetite, in Plato, can also pertain to non-sensory objects, such as articulated discourse. Chapter one asks what the universe can teach us about embodied life. It argues that Plato, in the Timaeus, works with an important link between the universe and the soul, and that the account of disorder, irrationality and multiformity identifying a pre-cosmic condition of the universe provides a key to understanding the excessive behaviour and condition of a soul dominated by appetite. Chapter two asks why the philosophers of the Republic’s Kallipolis return to the cave, and suggests that Plato’s notion of the noble lie provides a reasonable account of this. By exploring the Republic’s ideas of education, poetry and tradition, it argues that appetite – a multiform and appearance oriented source of motivation – is an essential part of this account. Chapter three asks why Socrates characterizes the speeches of the Phaedrus as deceptive games. It proposes that this question should be understood in the light of two distinctions: one between playful and serious discourse and one between simple and multiform. It argues that the speeches of the Phaedrus are multiform games, and suggests that appetite is the primary source of motivation of the soul addressed, personified by Phaedrus.

This dissertation re-examines a set of long-standing problems that arise from Aristotle’s defense of kingship in the Politics. Scholars have argued for over a century that Aristotle’s endorsement of sole rule by an individual of outstanding excellence is incompatible with his theory of distributive justice and his very conception of a political community. Previous attempts to resolve this apparent contradiction have failed to ease the deeper tensions between the idea of the polis as a community of free and equal citizens sharing in ruling and being ruled and the vision of absolute kingship in which one man rules over others who are merely ruled. I argue that the so-called “paradox of monarchy” emerges from misconceptions and insufficiently nuanced interpretations of kingship itself and of the more fundamental concepts of community, rule, authority, and citizenship. Properly understood, Aristotelian kingship is not a form of government that concentrates power in the hands of a single individual, but an arrangement in which free citizens willingly invest that individual with a position of supreme authority without themselves ceasing to share in rule. Rather than a muddled appendage tacked on to the Politics out of deference to Macedon or an uncritical adoption of Platonic utopianism, Aristotle’s defense of kingship is a piece of ideal theory that serves in part to undermine the pretensions of actual or would-be monarchs, whether warrior- or philosopher-kings. / text

The thesis has two aims. The first is to show that a more charitable approach to Manilius, such as Lucretian scholarship has exhibited in recent decades, yields a wealth of exciting discoveries that earlier scholarship has not thought to look for. The thesis' contributions to this project centre on three aspects of the poem: (I) the sophistication of its didactic techniques, which draw and build on various predecessors in the tradition of didactic poetry; (II) its cosmological, physical and theological basis, which has no exact parallel elsewhere in either astrology or natural philosophy, and despite clear debts to various traditions, is demonstrably the invention of our poet; (III) the extent to which rationales and physical bases are offered for points of astrological theory – something unparalleled in other astrological texts until Ptolemy. The second, related aim of the thesis is to offer a more satisfying interpretation of the poem as a whole than those that have hitherto been put forward. Again the cue comes from Lucretius: though the DRN is at first sight primarily an exposition of Epicurean physics, it becomes clear that its principal concern is ethical, steering its reader away from superstition, the fear of death and other damaging thought-patterns. Likewise, the Astronomica makes the best sense when its principal message is taken to be not the set of astrological statements that make up its bulk, but the poem’s peculiar world- view, for which those statements serve as an evidential basis. It is, on this reading, just as much a poem ‘on the nature of the universe', which provides the title of my thesis. At the same time, however, it finds new truth in the conventional assumption that Manilius is first and foremost an advocate of astrology: it reveals his efforts to defend astrology at all costs, uncovers strategies for making the reader more amenable to further astrological study and practice, and contends that someone with Manilius' set of beliefs must first have been a devotee of astrology before embracing a natural- philosophical perspective such as his. The thesis is divided into prolegomena and commentaries, which pursue the aims presented above in two different but complementary ways. The prolegomena comprise five chapters, outlined below: Chapter 1 presents a comprehensive survey of the evidence for the cosmology, physics and theology of the Astronomica, and discovers that a coherent and carefully thought-out world-view underlies the poem. It suggests that this Stoicising world- view is drawn exclusively from a few philosophical works of Cicero, but is nonetheless the product of careful synthesis. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between this world-view and earlier Academic criticism of astrology and concludes that the former has been developed as a direct response to these criticisms, specifically as set out in Cicero’s De divinatione. Chapter 3 examines the later impact of Manilius’ astrological world-view, as far as it can be detected, assessing the evidence for the early reception of his poem and its role in the history of philosophical astrology. The overwhelming impression is that the work was received as a serious contribution to debate over the physical and theological underpinnings of astrology; its world-view was absorbed into the mainstream of astrological theory and directly targeted in the next wave of Academic criticism of astrology. Chapter 4 looks at the more subtle strategies of persuasion that are at work in the Astronomica. It observes, first, a number of structural devices and word- patternings that set up the poem as a model of the universe it describes. This first part of the chapter concludes by asking what didactic and/or philosophical purpose such modelling could serve. The second part examines how, by a gradual process of habituation-through-metaphor, the reader is made familiar with the conventional astrological way of thinking about the world, which might otherwise have struck him as a baffling mass of contradictions. The third part looks at the use of certain rhetorical figures, particularly paradox, to re-emphasise important physical claims and assist the process of habituation. Chapter 5 takes on the task of making sense of the Astronomica as a whole, seeking out an underlying rationale behind the choice and ordering of material, accounting as well as is possible for its apparently premature end, and asking why, if it is a serious piece of natural-philosophical teaching, it so often appears to be self- undermining. A short epilogue asks what path can have led Manilius to embark on such a work as the Astronomica. It offers a sketch of the author as an adherent (but not a practitioner) of astrology, who had developed a philosophical system first as scaffolding for an art under threat, but had then come to see more importance in that philosophical underpinning than in the activities of prediction. The lemmatised commentaries that follow cover several passages from the first book of the Astronomica. As crucial as the remaining four books are to his natural-philosophical teaching, it is in this part of the poem that Manilius concentrates the direct expositions of his world-view. Like the chapters, the commentaries' two concerns are the nature and the exposition of the work's world-view. Each of the commentaries has its own focus, but all make full use of the format to tease out the poet's teaching strategies and watch his techniques operate 'in real time' over protracted stretches of text. Finally, an appendix presents the case for the Astronomica as the earliest evidence for the use of plane-image star maps. At two points in his tour of the night sky Manilius describes the positions of constellations in a way that suggests that he is consulting a stereographic projection of each hemisphere, and that he is assuming his reader has one to hand, too. This observation casts valuable new light on the development of celestial cartography.

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of the concept of reincarnation from an African point of view. It does so, largely, from the cultural perspective of the Akan people of Ghana. In this work, reincarnation is distinguished from such related concepts as metempsychosis and transmigration with which it is conflated by many authors on the subject. In terms of definition, therefore, the belief that a deceased person can be reborn is advanced in this dissertation as referring to only reincarnation, but not to either metempsychosis or transmigration. Many scholars would agree that reincarnation is a pristine concept, yet it is so present in the beliefs and worldviews of several cultures today (including those of Africa). A good appreciation of the concept, it can be seen, will not be possible without some reference to the past. That is why some attempt is first made at the early stages of the dissertation to show how reincarnation was understood in the religious philosophies of ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, Chinese and the Incas. Secondly, some link is then established between the past and present, especially between ancient Egyptian philosophy and those of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. In modern African thought, the doctrine of reincarnation has not been thoroughly researched into. Even so, some of the few who have written on the subject have denied its existence in African thought. The dissertation rejects this denial, and seeks to show nonetheless that reincarnation is generally an irrational concept. In spite of its irrationality, it is acknowledged that the concept, as especially presented in African thought, raises our understanding of the constitution of a person as understood in the African culture. It is also observed that the philosophical problem of personal identity is central to the discussion of reincarnation because that which constitutes a person is presumed to be known whenever a claim of return of a survived person is made. For this reason, the dissertation also pays significant attention to the concept of personal identity in connection, especially, with the African philosophical belief in the return of persons. / Philosophy and Systematic Theology / D. Litt. et Phil. (Philosophy)

Music and architecture share a sacred bond across cultures. Their histories intertwine and together, they shape ritualistic, religious, and popular practices. As one of the few remaining avenues of universal transcendental experiences that have been so integral to humans, music’s ability to create ecstatic spaces is ever more necessary for the modern human. This thesis uses spatial, artificial intelligence, visual, and aural tools—while engaging in a dialogue between rationalist architecture and shamanic conceptions of spaces—to create an ecstatic space that seeks to reimagine the union of music and architecture. It reveals new ways in which this union can be experienced synonymously and utilizes novel approaches to design such a space.

The purpose of this work is to explore the interactions between occultism and scholarly Egyptology from 1875 to 1930. Within this timeframe, numerous esoteric groups formed that centered their ideologies on conceptions of ancient Egyptian knowledge. In order to legitimize their belief systems based on ancient Egyptian wisdom, esotericists attempted to become authoritative figures on Egypt. This process heavily impacted Western intellectualism not only because occult conceptions of Egypt became increasingly popular, but also because esotericists intruded into academia or attempted to overshadow it. In turn, esotericists and Egyptologists both utilized the influx of new information from Egyptological studies to shape their identities, consolidate their ideologies, and maintain authority on the value of ancient Egyptian knowledge. This thesis follows the Egypt-centered developments of the Freemasons, the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley's A∴A∴, the Theosophical Society, the Anthroposophical Society, and the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis to demonstrate that esotericism evolved simultaneously with academia as a body of knowledge. By examining these fraternal occult groups' interactions with Egyptology, it can be better understood how esotericism has affected Western intellectualism, how ideologies form in response to new information, and the effects of becoming an authority on bodies of knowledge (in particular Egyptological knowledge). In turn, embedded in this work is a challenge to those who have downplayed or overlooked the agency of esotericists in shaping the Western intellectual tradition and preserving the legacy of ancient Egypt.

This study explores the rediscovery and development of a tradition of Ciceronian academic scepticism in British philosophy between c.1660-c.1760. It considers this tradition alongside two others, recently recovered by scholars, which were recognised by contemporaries to offer opposing visions of man, God and the origins of society: the Augustinian-Epicurean, and the neo-Stoic. It presents John Locke, Conyers Middleton and David Hume as the leading figures in the revival of the tradition of academic scepticism. It considers their works in relation to those of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, and Bernard Mandeville, whose writings refashioned respectively the neo-Stoic and Augustinian-Epicurean traditions in influential ways. These five individuals explicitly identified themselves with these late Hellenistic philosophical traditions, and sought to contest and redefine conventional estimations of their meaning and significance. This thesis recovers this debate, which illuminates our understanding of the development of the ‘science of man’ in Britain. Cicero was a central figure in Locke’s attempt to explain, against Hobbes, the origins of society and moral consensus independent of political authority. Locke was a theorist of societies, religious and civil. He provided a naturalistic explanation of moral motivation and sociability which, drawing heavily from Cicero, emphasised the importance of men’s concern for the opinions of others. Locke set this within a Christian divine teleology. It was Locke’s theologically-grounded treatment of moral obligation, and his attack on Stoic moral philosophy, that led to Shaftesbury’s attempt to vindicate Stoicism. This was met by Mandeville’s profoundly Epicurean response. The consequences of the neo-Epicurean and neo-Stoic traditions for Christianity were explored by Middleton, who argued that only academic scepticism was consistent with Christian belief. Hume explored the relationship between morality and religion with continual reference to Cicero. He did so, in contrast to Locke or Middleton, to banish entirely moral theology from philosophy.