This essay explores the topic of appropriation of nature and the resulting social alienation it imparts on several of the novel’s characters: Frankenstein, Walton, and the Creature. The Creature serves as a personification of both industrialism and urban atomization. His depiction as such follows Marxist critic Warren Montag’s argument that the novel renders the Creature more horrible through the suppression of modernity which makes him the embodiment of industrialism, and Frank Moretti’s claim that the novel favors pastoral, pre-industrial ideals (Montag, Moretti). Frankenstein’s materialist approach to science provides the driving force for this alienation and is informed by both mechanist philosophy (Hogsette) and a desire to remodel nature in accordance with human desire (Mellor). Rather than bringing prosperity, those endeavors alienate Frankenstein from his surrounding in a Marxian line of thought, and Frankenstein himself comes to resemble Bill Hughes’s concept of the negative version of Prometheus who loses himself in his materialist pursuits (Hughes). Drawing upon early German Romantic ideas of reconciliation with nature outlined by Alison Stone, this essay argues that much of the chaos in Frankenstein stems from anthropocentrism that is rooted in Hegelian philosophy and that a healthier solution to this view is proposed by early German Romantic organicism.

Modernity has generally been interpreted as a radical expression of human progress in the light of the advances of modern science and technology. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, however, modernity is a project "doomed to failure". Given the progressive-linearity of the modern model of rationality, the past has, in principle, been ruled out as a source of moral-political wisdom and guidance. From the perspective of modernity, the present (as the progressive moment of the future) has therefore nothing to learn from past traditions. MacIntyre contends that the moral confusion within modernity comes from its loss of telos, mediated in terms of the past. Modernity therefore harbours a paradox based on its inability to provide a philosophical justification for establishing the possibility of human solidarity in the present, while simultaneously affirming its faith in the future. In this regard, MacIntyre's work is an important contribution to the philosophical debate on modernity. / Philosophy / M. A. (Philosophy)

John Erskine was the leading Evangelical in the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Educated in an enlightened setting at Edinburgh University, he learned to appreciate the epistemology of John Locke and other empiricists alongside key Scottish Enlightenment figures such as his ecclesiastical rival, William Robertson. Although groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, Erskine changed career paths in order to become a minister of the Kirk. He was deeply moved by the endemic revivals in the west of Scotland and determined that his contribution to the burgeoning Evangelical movement on both sides of the Atlantic would be much greater as a clergyman than a lawyer. Yet Erskine was no ‘enthusiast’. He integrated the style and moral teachings of the Enlightenment into his discourses and posited new theories on traditional views of Calvinism in his theological treatises. Erskine’s thought, however, never transgressed the boundaries of orthodoxy. His goal was to update Evangelical Calvinism with the new style and techniques of the Enlightenment without sacrificing the gospel message. While Erskine was widely recognised as an able preacher and theologian, his primary contribution to Evangelicalism was as a disseminator. He sent correspondents like the New England pastor Jonathan Edwards countless religious and philosophical works so that he and others could learn about current ideas, update their writings to conform to the Age of Reason and provide an apologetic against perceived heretical authors. Erskine also was crucial in the publishing of books and pamphlets by some of the best Evangelical theologians in America and Britain. Within his lifetime, Erskine’s main contribution to Evangelicalism was as a propagator of an enlightened form of Calvinism.

Modernity has generally been interpreted as a radical expression of human progress in the light of the advances of modern science and technology. According to Alasdair MacIntyre, however, modernity is a project "doomed to failure". Given the progressive-linearity of the modern model of rationality, the past has, in principle, been ruled out as a source of moral-political wisdom and guidance. From the perspective of modernity, the present (as the progressive moment of the future) has therefore nothing to learn from past traditions. MacIntyre contends that the moral confusion within modernity comes from its loss of telos, mediated in terms of the past. Modernity therefore harbours a paradox based on its inability to provide a philosophical justification for establishing the possibility of human solidarity in the present, while simultaneously affirming its faith in the future. In this regard, MacIntyre's work is an important contribution to the philosophical debate on modernity. / Philosophy, Practical and Systematic Theology / M. A. (Philosophy)

Amidst the upheaval of the French Revolution, the British parliamentarian and political theorist Edmund Burke received a vibrant reception in German-speaking Europe. Anxious to uncover the ideological roots of the anarchy that enveloped France – and worried that their own society might be vulnerable to a similar fate – a series of important German thinkers began studying his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This dissertation brings into focus the diverse interpretations of Burke that were assembled in this turbulent era, and explains them vis-à-vis contemporary debates among German idealists (Kant and his heirs) about the philosophical nature of freedom. This dissertation centers on Burke’s three most perceptive and influential students: the civil servant and philosopher August Wilhelm Rehberg; the journalist, translator, and diplomat Friedrich Gentz; and the political economist and cultural critic Adam Müller. For many decades, both German- and English-speaking intellectual historians have shoehorned these thinkers into a rigid ideological box labeled ‘conservatism’. Inspired by Burke, they are said to have turned away from the ideals of Enlightenment, theorizing an illiberal form of politics that was traditionalistic, authoritarian, and reactionary. A careful, contextualized reconstruction of their engagements with Burke, however, renders this thesis untenable. Far from triggering a monolithic backlash against Enlightenment, Burke in fact inspired a series of divergent, and often incompatible, analyses of the Revolution’s origins, grounded in different readings of his Reflections. Rehberg, for instance, saw Burke as a principled skeptic: he admired the Reflections as an incisive critique of the revolutionaries’ philosophical dogmatism. Gentz, an erstwhile student of Kant, disagreed completely, arguing that Burke’s politics were entirely compatible with Kantian metaphysics. In his view, the Reflections’ central insight was that it takes political prudence to realize the rights of man in practice. Müller, finally, read the Reflections as a lament for the fall of Christendom, and as a diagnosis of the social alienation and moral confusion that had followed its demise. In other words, whereas Rehberg was a Humean skeptic and Gentz was a Kantian liberal, Müller was a Trinitarian Christian. Each of these men, moreover, claimed Burke as an ally. What this means is that Rehberg, Gentz, and Müller cannot have jointly invented a single thing called ‘conservatism’, and Burke cannot have inspired it. This becomes clear only after we recognize that at the turn of the nineteenth century, neither the meaning of Enlightenment nor the crux of Burke’s Reflections was clear: these were not fixed variables, but points of contemporary debate. By recapturing the diversity of Burke’s German reception, this thesis invites scholars to consider the ways that his students shepherded their differing visions of Enlightenment through the fires of the Revolution, down into the nineteenth century.

This thesis is a study of factory owner Abraham Abrahamson Hülphers’s collections of parish description about the parishes in Norrland, more specifically those about Medelpad and Ångermanland. The thesis seeks to explain how Hülphers’s collections were created in practice while also presenting the descriptions content and analysing the ideology it reproduced. It does so by analysing Hülphers’s published descriptions, his travel journal and some of his correspondence. The thesis uses Mary Louise Pratts ideas about the imperial gaze as a theoretical framework to understand the work of Hülphers and the relation between the enlightened middle class and the peasantry which they described. The thesis investigates the idea of the parish descriptions understood as Hülphers travel journal reworked, arguing that Hülphers journey through Norrland was important for social reasons, rather than information gathering, and presenting the collections as new texts, not transformed versions of the journal. Furthermore the thesis discusses who helped Hülphers create the descriptions and the impact these men, from the same enlightened middle class as Hülphers himself, had on the text. The thesis also handles the economic ideology of the enlightenment as mirrored and reproduced by the descriptions. Here the focus lies on the priorities of the parishes different lines of work and the boundless optimism of enlightenment man – as nature could be conquered completely by man’s reason. Finally the thesis discusses the way Hülphers described the local culture; what he considered to be virtues and vices in the peasant population in terms of habits, language and dress, also showing the great value he considered the local dignitaries to have and discussing his disdain towards the superstitions of old as these could lead a community towards chaos.

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This study aims to provide a critical assessment of social networking sites along with the underlying form of rationality propelling such technological innovations. The hypothesis of this study is rooted in the firm conviction that while social networking sites can be regarded as impressive technological achievements, and while there are certainly an array of benefits that can be associated with them, they nevertheless can be perceived as a hegemonic force which surreptitiously undermines the autonomy and freedom of the modern individual. In order to corroborate and augment such an assertion, this study relies primarily on the critical works of Adorno and Horkheimer (1997); Bauman (2003; 2007 & 2013) and Foucault (1977) in order to both investigate and critically evaluate the everyday assumptions typically associated with a technologically enlightened society, techno-scientific rationality and the recent emergence of technological tools such as social networking services. Based upon the findings that have emerged throughout the course of this investigation, it becomes clear to see that there is indeed a dialectical tension inherent to the nature of the various social networking technologies as they currently operate within the 21st century. Such a discovery is primarily based upon the fact that while social networking technologies do inherently possess emancipatory potentialities for the modern individual, they have nevertheless failed to actualise such potentialities due to the following reasons: 1) Social networking technologies have managed to propagate and entrench a powerful sentiment of technological determinism within modern society along with a highly corrosive form of instrumentalized rationality to which all individuals are now required to acquiesce; 2) Such technologies are paradoxically abrogating the possibility of meaningful interpersonal contiguity due to the fact they have managed to commodify the technological culture associated with a digital form of interaction/communication along with the individual making use of such technologies; and 3) In their current format, social networking services are allowing for the objectification, manipulation and exploitation of the online subject to take place in order to pursue and promote an instrumentalized strategy of marketing surveillance and capital accumulation. / MA (Philosophy), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015