Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1962. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [260]-275).

Thesis (M.A.P.S.)--Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries, 1985. / Bibliography: leaves 109-112.

In the pages that follow, I offer a theoretical perspective for thinking about communication. My ideas here are informed by different existential philosophies that were prominent at the beginning of the last century. Taking up the project of what German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls "philosophizing in communication," this exercise in thought reflects an emotive and scholarly movement that dances around a central notion of communication as possibility. Drawing upon the oblique concept of Existenz as a philosophical and communicative orientation--elucidated in the past by thinkers including Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers--I explore this idea so as to illuminate some new ways of thinking about intrapersonal, interpersonal, public, and mythic forms of communication. It is my hope that, ultimately, hearing our own Existenzspeak might conjure an atmosphere of thought and communication predicated on freedom and re-enchantment with the mysteries of existence that, however subtly, call out to us through channels both familiar and strange.

abstract: Authenticity has been conceived of in several different ways with various meanings and implications. The existential conception has the advantage of tracking authenticity from the phenomenology of human beings and their lived, social experience. From Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger’s criteria for existentialist authenticity, I develop the argument that authentic, feminist projects are necessarily one mode of being authentic within a patriarchal society. In defining a conception of authenticity out of Sartre and Heidegger’s terms, the question of what qualifies as an authentic feminist project arises as well as the question of what sort of content qualifies as authentic. While Simone De Beauvoir does not focus on authenticity in her ethics, she does give a basis for a value oriented, content relevant aspect of existentialism generally. Insofar as authenticity is an existentialist concept, feminist authenticity is one valuable and worthwhile project within a social patriarchy, as it promotes existence as freedom. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Philosophy 2017

D.Phil. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Leo Strauss resurrected a life-approach of the ancient Greeks and reformulated it as an alternative to the existentialism of his age that grew out of a radicalized historicism. He attempted to resuscitate the tenability of a universal grounded in nature (nature understood in a comprehensive experiential sense not delimited to the physical, sensibly-perceived world alone) that was historically malleable. Through reengagement with Plato and Socrates and by addressing the basic premises built into the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, Strauss resurrected poetry (art, or the mythos) that Enlightenment thinkers had discarded, and displayed its reasonableness on a par with the modern scientific approach as an animating informer of life. He thereby placed philosophy in a place subservient to poetry/the mythos, as had the ancients.

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The Liar is one of the Danish writer Martin A. Hansen's best known and popular novels. The Liar is influenced by existentialism, one can call it a work of Christian existentialism. In my thesis I demonstrate which main features of Christian existentialism are present in the novel. In the first part I describe existentialism as philosophy. Existentialism came from France to Denmark. It is a philosophy that focuses on the concrete individual. People must create their own existentence by accepting responsibility for their action. The important concepts are freedom, choice and responsibility. They denote the authentic existence. People in the inauthentic existence are passive, they don't act and don't accept responsibility. Existentialism takes up the question of freedom, too. But one is condemned to freedom and can't escape. That's why the world is absurd and incomprehensible. One can find most of the existentialist elements in The Liar. The protagonist Johannes Vig lives an inauthentic existence. He likes to lie to the people. He is passive, he doesn't act. In the middle of the novel he understands that he didn't live right and tries to find a better way of living. It is not easy, Johannes has lost the fight about Annemari (the girl he loves) and slept with Rigmor (the woman who loves him). But now he has...

As much of the scholarly literature shows, gender has served as a central organizing force for knowing and theorizing about sexuality. The governmentality of sexuality in Western societies over the last 200 years has led to sex being discursively implicated with reproduction, and this has had a profound effect on the ways sexuality has been theorized and understood in terms of gendered desire. The aim of this dissertation is to theorize an alternative approach to sexuality that decenters gender and gives attention to the materiality of sex and the body. Using existentialism and phenomenology, this dissertation offers a particular challenge to heteronormative conceptions of “sexual orientation” and “sexual identity” for their ostensibly timeless and enduring quality, or being. The research presented herein theorizes sexuality through an ontology of becoming that takes into account the diverse, multi-faceted nature of sexuality as a series of temporal experiences, attractions, desires, sensations, practices, and identities – that is, as a phenomenon. A genealogical methodology is used to trace the discursive history of sexuality and demonstrate how modernist discourses of sexuality have influenced how sexuality is known and experienced. This research emphasizes the discursive constraints on knowledge about sexuality. In considering an alternative framework, the principles of existentialism and phenomenology are critically examined through the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Attention is then turned toward a non-classical paradigm of science to elaborate on an ontology of becoming and its significance for understanding the development of sex and sexuality. In conjunction, contemporary biological research is introduced to expand upon de Beauvoir’s (1996) analysis of “the data of biology” on sexual difference and to help situate the sexed body as dynamic and developmental. An existential phenomenological approach theorizes sexuality as a self-project and the dialectical becoming between the sexed body and the sexual self. Because both the body and the self are contingent becomings that are open to instability and change, so too is sexuality. This alternative approach offers particular attention to the body in sexuality and considers the materialities of sexual desire. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2013-02-04 00:33:41.993