Navorsing oor veranderende konsepte van God toon aan dat die oorsprong van ateïsme na die skolastici van die laat-middeleeue teruggevoer kan word. Hierdie ondersoek poog om die verhouding tussen Johannes Duns Scotus se eenduidige konseptualisering van God en die verwerping van God deur moderne ateïste aan te toon. Die verandering van Thomas Aquinas se analogiese teologie na Johannes Duns Scotus se eenduidige ontologiese konseptualisering van God het `n groot invloed op nominalistiese teologie en die moderne realiteitsverstaan gehad. Nominaliste soos William van Occam het hierdie eenduidige konsep van God later kombineer en verder ontwikkel met die gevolg dat God later nie meer ontologiese voorkeur geniet het nie. Waar Aquinas die klem op God se transendensie gelê het, was daar ‘n toenemende neiging om God al hoe meer immanent te verstaan. ʼn God wat op dieselfde wyse as die mens bestaan, word dus ʼn “wese”, ʼn “getemde God”. Scotus en latere nominaliste het God se kwantitatiewe andersheid bo sy kwalitatiewe andersheid beklemtoon. Binne `n akademiese ruimte waarin die waarheid van die Christelike geloof en die outoriteit van die Rooms Katolieke Kerk nie bevraagteken is nie, was die invloed van hierdie teologiese veranderinge klein. Die Reformasie het dit egter verander, en alhoewel dit nie die bedoeling was nie, was die gevolg dat hierdie eenduidige konseptualisering van God deel van moderne teïsme geword het. Duns Scotus se invloed was so groot dat daar ook na hom as die stigter van moderniteit verwys kan word. Na die Reformasie het Descartes se cogito ergo sum daartoe gelei dat die rede alleen as bron van betekenis gegeld het. Hierdie ontwikkeling het voorkeur aan epistemologie bo ontologie gegee. Binne hierdie moderne realiteitsverstaan is daar nie plek vir ʼn eenduidige konseptualisering van God nie. Omdat ateïste juis hierdie konsep van God verwerp, is daar waarde in die bestudering van ateïsme. Sleutelwoorde: ateïsme, Thomas Aquinas, Johannes Duns Scotus, William van Occam, analogie van syn, eenduidige syn, Descartes, die Reformasie, Amos Funkenstein, Gavin Hyman, Brad Gregory, epistemologie, ontologie, skolastici, nominalisme, moderniteit, moderne teïsme. / Dissertation (MTh)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Dogmatics and Christian Ethics / MTh / Unrestricted

The core of House M.D. is its assertion that current Western civilization lives in a perpetual state of dissonance: we desire to have the rawness of emotion but we can only handle this rawness when we combine it with intellect, even if that intellect lies to us. This is the ontological paradox that the televisual text grapples with. Through the use of archetypal analysis and allegorical interpretation, this thesis reveals that dissonance and its relationship to contemporary Western society. Through House M.D. we realize that there are structures to the paradoxes that we live and there are paradoxes in our structures. Dr. House is a trickster in an allegory of American capitalist culture. The trickster metaphorically pulls away from society the rules protecting cultural values. Dr. House and House M.D. participate in revealing the cultural disruption of the current moment of Western society. While playing on the genres of detective fiction and hospital dramas, House M.D. is an existential allegory exposing the paradox that we can never be free while still seeking our own self-interest.

Nineteen Eighty-Four de George Orwell, A Clockwork Orange d'Anthony Burgess et Meccania: The Superstate d'Owen Gregory révèlent trois régimes oppressifs qui manipulent la science dans le but de contrôler leurs populations. Les auteurs dénoncent la déshumanisation et l'esclavage générés par cette collaboration politico-scientifique. Ainsi, cette étude va explorer les dystopies susmentionnées en analysant leur critique du mariage politico-scientifique. Je vais montrer que la coopération entre les politiciens et les scientifiques est destinée à contrôler les individus et à pénaliser les éléments dissidents. Je vais examiner les mécanismes politico-scientifiques de surveillance et de punition, tout en montrant que les politiciens usent de la science pour assurer la continuité et la stabilité des régimes tyranniques. Finalement, je vais souligner la capacité de l'écriture à dévoiler les abus politico-scientifiques, et à prévenir une coalition entre la connaissance scientifique et le pouvoir despotique.

In the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio. / text

Medieval rhetoric, as a field and as a subject, has largely been under-developed and under-emphasized within medieval and rhetorical studies for several reasons: the disconnect between Germanic, Anglo-Saxon society and the Greco-Roman tradition that defined rhetoric as an art; the problems associated with translating the Old and Middle English vernacular in light of rhetorical and, thereby, Greco-Latin precepts; and the complexities of the medieval period itself with the lack of surviving manuscripts, often indistinct and inconsistent political and legal structure, and widespread interspersion and interpolation of Christian doctrine. However, it was Christianity and its governance of medieval culture that preserved classical rhetoric within the medieval period through reliance upon a classic epideictic platform, which, in turn, became the foundation for early medieval rhetoric. The role of epideictic rhetoric itself is often undervalued within the rhetorical tradition because it appears too basic or less essential than the judicial or deliberative branches for in-depth study and analysis. Closer inspection of this branch reveals that epideictic rhetoric contains fundamental elements of human communication with the focus upon praise and blame and upon appropriate thought and behavior. In analyzing the medieval world’s heritage and knowledge of the Greco-Roman tradition, epideictic rhetoric’s role within the writings and lives of Greek and Roman philosophers, and the popular Christian writings of the medieval period – such as Alfred’s translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Alfred’s translation of Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, and the anonymously written Vercelli and Blickling homiles – an early medieval rhetoric begins to be revealed. This Old English rhetoric rests upon a blended epideictic structure based largely upon the encomium and vituperation formats of the ancient progymnasmata, with some additions from the chreia and commonplace exercises, to form a unique rhetoric of the soul that aimed to convert words into moral thought and action within the lives of every individual. Unlike its classical predecessors, medieval rhetoric did not argue, refute, or prove; it did not rely solely on either praise or blame; and it did not cultivate words merely for intellectual, educative, or political purposes. Instead, early medieval rhetoric placed the power of words in the hands of all humanity, inspiring every individual to greater discernment of character and reality, greater spirituality, greater morality, and greater pragmatism in daily life.

This paper interweaves narrativized readings and experiential narratives as personal and cultural resources for counterhegemonic cultural critique within our historical context of globalization and ecological crisis. Framed by perspectives on epistemology, everyday life, and place, these reflections seek to engage and revitalize our notions of community, creativity, and the individual, towards visioning the human art of community as a counternarrative to globalization. Such a task involves confronting the meanings we have come to ascribe to work and economy which so deeply determine our social fabric. Encountering the thought of key 19th and 20th century social theorists ranging from William Morris, Gregory Bateson, and Raymond Williams, to Murray Bookchin, Martin Buber, and Wendell Berry, these reflections mark the indivisible web of culture in the face of our insistent divisions, and further, iterate our innate creativity as the source for a vital, sustainable culture that might reflect, in Bateson’s terms, the pattern that connects.