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This study examines two interconnected and as yet wholly neglected aspects of Max Weber's 'Sociology of Law,' namely, its substantive underpinnings and focal concern with the status of the judge. At the heart of the 'Sociology of Law' is a comparative analysis of the Continental and the English administrations of justice, which can best be understood when read against his substantive sociology and which requires an assiduous reading of the 'Sociology of Law.' Thus the first part of this examination elucidates Weber's overarching concern with the effects of bureaucratization on the development of personality. The second part provides a detailed explication of the 'Sociology of Law' which privileges his treatment of the Common Law and distinguishes the juristic and sociological strands of his analysis, re-examines his notion of formal and substantive rationality, pays close attention to his assessment of the Free Law Movement, and accords due place to his discussion of the anti-formalistic tendencies in modern law. Taken together, these expose the contradictions and assumptions which frame his tendentious analysis and bring to light the vital role he ascribes to the judge.

During the first half of the XVIIIth century in Russia, deep social and cultural changes led to a chaotic linguistic situation. The Russian scholar Michail Lomonosov played a key role in the grammatical and lexical organization of the Russian literary language around the middle of the century. His contributions are reviewed and their importance analyzed in the present thesis. / Chapter One provides an analysis of the linguistic situation during the first half of the XVIIIth century. The role and the functions of different linguistic elements are examined, including West European lexical borrowings, the native Russian, the Church Slavonic, and their mutual interactions. / Chapters two and three analyze M. Lomonosov's role in the standardization of Russian grammar and vocabulary by examining his two major philological works: the "Rossiaeiskaeiia Grammatika" and the article "Predislovie o polbze knig tserkovnikh v rossiiskom yazike." / Although Lomonosov's merit is widely acknowledged among scholars, the importance of his stylistic theory has been challenged lately. In Chapter Four, Lomonosov's linguistic contributions to the development of the modern Russian literary language are weighed and assessed against these critical arguments.

This dissertation explores the way Jurgen Moltmann's biblical hermeneutic informs his salvation-historical approach to ecological theology. Coming from the post-Barthian camp of German Protestant theology, Moltmann has inherited Karl Barth's theological critique of the technological-scientific spirit of modernity. Moltmann differs from Barth, however, in the fact that his underlying preoccupation with the question of theodicy leads him to interpret Barth's theological critique of modernity from within the perspective of modernity's victims. This he accomplishes by retrieving the biblical tradition of eschatologia crucis. Moltmann's political hermeneutic of scripture, which he develops on the basis of the eschatologia crucis, vindicates his salvation-historical approach to nature by offering a substantial critique of the modern techno-scientific spirit. Furthermore, it enables Moltmann's ecological theology to put the crisis of modernity within the broader horizon of the problem of radical evil, thereby offering a profounder hope for the liberation of the suffering creation called for by the WCC theme "Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation."

On numerous occasions Ricoeur has characterized the goal of his philosophical analyses as the "exchange of the ego, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text." Our investigation follows the development of this theme through careful examination of Ricoeur's phenomenological-hermeneutical philosophy. By way of contrast with Husserl's phenomenology we see how Ricoeur initiates a program of self-recovery that decenters consciousness from the immediacy of self-grounding radicality. Looking instead to the polysemic world of the text, Ricoeur chooses a path of indirect imaginative mediation as the route towards self-interpretation. / The imagination, correlative with the works of culture (signs, symbols and texts), forms the central core of Ricoeur's understanding of selfhood. Already operative in his early publications as the mediating structure of selfhood, the work of imagination is transformed from a transcendental third term into a linguistic process that constructs sonorous worlds in front of consciousness for the self to inhabit. / Ricoeur's analysis of metaphor and narrative shows selfhood to be a task accomplished by means of linguistic interpretation. However, such an interpretation of the self, with the textual world as its other, is a linguistic construction that is caught up in semantic self-identification. Ricoeur's program for the exchange of the self-enclosed ego, for a self discipled by the text, becomes entangled in the semantics of identity to such an extent that selfhood is equated with the objectifications of the reflective process and is never dealt with on the intimate level of the reflexive structure of the self in relation to otherness. This has significant consequences which need to be critically examined by philosophy of religion.

This thesis is a contribution to the study of the biblical interpretation of the Italian Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562). Specifically researched is Martyr's use of the Jewish resources of the 1525 Bomberg Bible in his interpretation of Lamentations, Martyr's earliest surviving commentary. The form of this investigation is as follows: first, an introduction to the use of Jewish resources by Christian students of scripture; secondly, an annotated translation of Martyr's Lamentations commentary; thirdly, conclusions concerning Martyr's use of Jewish commentary. After a select bibliography, there are appendices which include a synopsis of sixteenth century Latin translations of Lamentations and an annotated translation of the Jewish commentators on Lamentations in the 1525 Bomberg Bible. An argument will be made that Martyr drew much useful philology from the Jewish commentators but also unwittingly absorbed considerable non-philological exegesis in order to embellish his commentary and on occasion to evade the results of philological exegesis.

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This thesis comprises a re-evaluation of the feminist theological critique, as given by Valerie Saiving, Judith Plaskow, Daphne Hampson and Susan Nelson Dunfee, of Reinhold Niebuhr's doctrine of sin. The re-evaluation proceeds from a contextual interpretation of Niebuhr's theology in general and a contextual reading of his doctrine of sin in particular. My argument is that Niebuhr is deliberately and consistently a contextual theologian. I locate his contextual methodology in the open-ended approach of Christian realism. / The feminist critique is based on the assumption that Niebuhr universally defines the primary sin as pride. It is argued that pride is in fact a distinctly male characteristic, and, while quite plausibly the primary sin for men, is clearly not the primary sin for women. Niebuhr is guilty, that is, of confusing male reality with human reality in the doctrine. Saiving and Plaskow then develop a definition of women's sin which they correspond with Niebuhr's sin of sensuality. This type of sin, rather than being self-aggrandizing, is characterized by inordinate and destructive self-effacement. Their subsidiary argument is that Niebuhr erroneously treats sensuality, which should be equal but opposite to pride, as a secondary form of sin. / My argument in this thesis is that the critique rests on a mistaken assumption about the universality of Niebuhr's claim. His concerns were with the powerful. The contextual claim that pride is the primary form of sin in those who are empowered is being mistaken for a claim that pride is the primary sin for all people, regardless of gender or context. My subsidiary argument is that the correlation of women's sin with Niebuhr's understanding of sensuality is mistaken. What the feminists refer to as women's sin is in fact not sin at all for Niebuhr but evidence of injustice. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The notion of "the subject" is central methodologically to the heuristics of Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957; 5th ed., 1992) is Lonergan's most significant work in which he attempts to unveil the ever-elusive dynamics of conscious being as it functions in diverse realms of human thought. Essential to this endeavor is the identification of conscious operations (acts) and their objectifications (contents). This constitutes the "semantic" burden of Insight which, consequently, ought not to be separated from Lonergan's pragmatical mode of investigation. Failure to note this dipolar structure of Insight results in misinformed analyses which are quick to make faulty ideational correlations, thereby excusing out of hand any ingenuity on the part of Lonergan. This study attempts to reverse such trends by examining certain basic relations of the thinking subject in Insight (i.e. "experience" and "understanding"), and by developing the dynamics of such a relation in the larger context of the differentiations of consciousness (i.e. "intellectual" and "religious"), a concept that is brought to full fruition in Lonergan's widely read Method in Theology (1972).

This dissertation argues that a pervasive ethical vision underlies the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): a concern for the possibility of human flourishing, in the modern world. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's celebrated claim to be "beyond good and evil", and against the standard interpretation of his "perspectivism", it is argued that Nietzsche makes qualitative, normative distinctions between higher, admirable modes of human existence and lower, contemptible ones, and that he wishes through his writings to foster the former and discourage the latter. Furthermore, it is argued that Nietzsche believes human excellence to be the property of a small minority of "higher" human beings, and that he identifies the project of encouraging human excellence with a political imperative of cultivating this gifted elite. The dissertation also argues that Nietzsche's picture of the fully flourishing human life suffers from a number of inconsistencies that may be traced back to his vacillation between two incompatible moral discourses: an Aristotelian discourse emphasising the importance of certain "external goods" (e.g. friendship, recognition, community) in a fully flourishing life, and a rival, Stoic-influenced discourse stressing the virtuous individual's total self-sufficiency. An examination is made of Nietzsche's stance towards the following key concepts and questions: truth, morality, virtue, instinct and "bodily" knowledge, nature, creativity, rationality, discipline and self-mastery, freedom, solitude and sociability, friendship, community, pity, breeding and heredity, women and gender relations, and domination.