The purpose of this study is to endeavor to interpret these various aspects of dualism through an analysis of selected examples of art from two cultural areas, Africa and China.

The book presents an argument for moral objectivity based on non-dualism, drawing on the Buddhist tradition but argued from first premises in relation to Western philosophical understandings of ethics. The first part consists of a critique both of the theoretical and practical shortcomings of views of ethics which rely on positive or negative metaphysical claims about the foundation for universal ethics or about its absence. The dualism underlying these two alternatives is understood in terms of a psychological model according to which the rational ego utilises metaphysical belief to separate itself from the remainder of the psyche and its associated alternative grounds of belief. Metaphysical beliefs are shown to be related to egoistic psychological dispositions through the use of philosophical, historical, and psychological evidence, and this account used as the basis of a criticism of all the main existing ethical theories in Western philosophy. In the second part a more positive account is provided of a non-dualistic Middle Way, which attempts to show that there is an alternative to the dualism revealed in Part 1. This Middle Way unites systematic metaphysical agnosticism in philosophy with moral practice that attempts to integrate the ego incrementally with the remainder of the psyche. Psychological integration thus becomes the basis of a new way of understanding moral (and other types of) objectivity without positive or negative metaphysical assumptions. To understand integration as a basis of ethics requires the systematic incrementalisation of the dualisms on which Western philosophy habitually relies, such as subject-object, fact-value, mind-body, and freewill-determinism. Without these dualistic prior assumptions, a balanced investigation can be made into all the conditions which influence our moral judgements. Personal and group virtue can be cultivated, and specificity of guidance on areas of moral judgement where we are ignorant imported by the balanced use of moral expertise. Supporting materials for this thesis are available on http://www.moralobjectivity.net and a published version is available on http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/a-theory-of-moral-objectivity/15123628?showPreview .

This thesis examines theoretical and popular ways of knowing the prostitute and the client. Its purpose is to intervene in contemporary ways of knowing and articulate a more consistent feminist stance on prostitution. Currently, the prostitute is known predominantly through the discourse of psychology whilst the client is known through the discourse of sexology. She is deviant and he is normal. She is a victim and he is an agent. The issue of inconsistency in the feminist stance on prostitution is related to the recognition that these dualisms figure in the way in which all knowledge of the client and the prostitute is organised. Within feminist theory the prostitute is known through the dualism of victim and agent whilst the client is known through the sex/gender distinction. The former perpetuates certain ways of knowing the prostitute that cannot embrace the complexity and ambivalence of prostitution for women. If she is a victim she is only passive and exploited. If she is an agent she is both active and free. Utilising the latter allows the client to escape scrutiny. This thesis will argue that this is for two reasons. Firstly, because feminists have tended to support the idea of the prostitute as agent within the victim/agent dichotomy. Within such a way of knowing, any critique of the client became a critique of the livelihood of the prostitute, and is best avoided. Secondly, because feminists tend to work within the sex/gender distinction and its associated dualisms of mind and body, nature and culture. As such, they tend to perpetuate, rather than challenge, the sexological relationship between the sexual and the social. In both analyses, the sexual urge is ultimately natural, albeit modified by society. Analyses that argue for the social constitution of sexuality (rather than simply its social construction) still perpetuate the sex/gender distinction by claiming the validity of the mind/body dualism for their analyse. This thesis will argue that these dualisms structure an impossible choice for feminists and help to position them within the divisive prostitution debate. In a political climate that perpetuates only two ways of knowing prostitution, to critique prostitution is to be anti-sex, moralising, prudish and conservative. In contrast, to support prostitution is hailed as pro-sex, pro-women and pro-choice. Within this dichotomising of the political issue, feminists gain either conservative or libertarian allies. Within such a political climate, a consistent feminist position is lost. In order to counter this political and theoretical inconsistency, this thesis argues for a connection between the dualisms through the organisation of modern liberal democracies. To know the prostitute through the victim/agent dichotomy and the client through the sex/gender distinction (and associated dualisms of mind and body, nature and culture) is also to call upon the public/private split as their organising feature. The public/private split gives meaning to the dualisms of victim and agent, sex and gender, mind and body, through its role in the perpetuation of associations between victim, body, sex, private and women, and between agent, gender, mind, public and men. This thesis will argue that these dualisms are not useful for explaining the ambivalent and contradictory status of prostitution as both work and sex, public and private, rational and irrational, embodied and disembodied, sexual and social. However, not only does prostitution challenge the explanatory value of these dualisms, but the experience of prostitution for the prostitute and the client both subverts and inverts these dualisms. The usual configuration of the dualisms public/private, worker/consumer, male/female, mind/body, rationality/irrationality, are public, worker, male, mind, rationality, in contrast to private, consumer, female, body, irrationality. The prostitute is positioned in and through modern liberal democracies as embodied, but claims the status of worker through her experience of disembodiment. The client is positioned in and through modern liberal democracies as disembodied, and continues this proprietorial relationship with his body during the prostitution contract. She becomes the embodied worker and he becomes the disembodied sex partner. This further demonstrates the inability of a dualistic conception of prostitution to take into account the ambivalent and contradictory status of the prostitute and the client. Whilst this thesis will suggest that such an ambivalent status is to be found in all relations between men and women in modern liberal democracies, it will also propose the political implications of this theoretical reconfiguration for the feminist position on prostitution.

No description available.

In describing the mind’s place in the physical world, philosophers have produced a diversity of views. On the far right of the spectrum we find substance dualists, who think that there is in addition to physical substance, mental substance. A little to the left strong property dualists claim that while there is only physical substance, there are in addition to physical properties, mental properties. These two views broadly represent accounts of mind on which physicalism is explicitly considered false. Among those who think physicalism is true, are reductionists and non-reductionists. The former sit on the far left, claiming that there is only physical substance and that mental properties just are physical properties. Non-reductionists are at the center; rejecting the possibility of reduction, claiming that mental properties are distinct from physical ones, while resisting anti-physicalist claims about mental properties and substance. In this paper I will argue that this spectrum needs to be substantially revised. In particular I will argue that non-reductive views are unavailable and that strong property dualist views are problematically related to views that are dualistic about substance. I will present an alternative physicalist view that does not appear on the above-mentioned spectrum. I will not provide an outright defense of the view, but I will argue that it is worth further consideration because it enables us to avoid many of the difficulties commonly associated with the abovementioned views. Ultimately the view’s success will be determined by the possibility of accounting for subjective properties of phenomenal experience in terms of objective physical ones. It is beyond the scope of this paper to pronounce on this matter, but I will argue that if one thinks that the difference between the subjectivity of experience and the objectivity of physical properties is due to anything more than shortcomings in human explanatory capabilities, one is really endorsing a non-physicalist position. In this way, I hope to show that the best chance for a future physicalism lies in the alternative view that I offer here.

In this dissertation, I re-interpret Spinoza's parallelism theory in the Ethics according to an original ontological, dualistic and idealistic perspective. The main thesis I put forward is that parallelism, and the dualism it harbours, is the only possible mediation between Spinoza's monism and his pluralism, i.e. between the unique substance and the 'infinite things in infinite modes' that follow from it. Second, I argue that the theory of parallelism is both coherent and unitary and no fracture should be viewed between Proposition 7 of Part II of the Ethics and its following Scholium. This interpretative strategy is original as it takes a route that is generally neglected by Spinoza scholarship, and thus is in contrast to those interpretations that see an unsurmountable contradiction in Spinoza's parallelism or that distinguish an ontological variant from an epistemological variant of it. Moreover, my interpretation of parallelism originally clarifies some obscure passages in later parts of the Ethics, such as the Spanish poet anecdote and the eternal mind doctrine. My interpretation is the result of a full-fledged idealistic interpretation that is based on the pronounced pre-eminence of the attribute of thought in Spinoza's system and that leads me to originally re-interpret some key doctrines of Spinoza's metaphysics, such as the conceptual independence of attributes that can be found in Proposition 10 of Part I. Additionally, in my dissertation, I draw some theoretical and historico-philosophical comparisons between Spinoza and past thinkers or his contemporaries (Scholastic authors, Descartes, Leibniz) as they clearly indicate that parallelism is an original and unprecedented thesis in the history of philosophy.

Thesis (M.A.)--Denver Seminary, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-70).

No description available.

The intent of this thesis is to present James W. Cornman and Keith Lehrer's critical review of the classical body-mind problem and to present a persona defense of the theory known as dualistic interactionism. In establishing dualistic interactionism between a person's body and mind, evidence can be given to demonstrate an overarching relationship between the mental and physical. Furthermore, in establishing such a theory it is possible to show that a person can learn to exert voluntary control over biological states. And in establishing voluntary control over bodily events and states, volition, a cognitive process, clearly can be seen to be a control dimension in human behavior and of the human psyche.

Senior Honors thesis--Regis University, Denver, Colo., 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 12, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.