This essay is a comparative analysis with focus on Jean-Paul Sartre´s existentialism and Ferdinand Alquié´s cartesianism. They both represented the French philosophy of conscience in the early and mid 1900s. Because of that, they had similar ideas concerning the human conscience and freedom of the mind. But how did they come to those conclusions? And in which cases did they differ from one and other?

The purpose of this essay is to try and bring clarity to the question, what is Chick Lit and which factors make it so popular. My thesis  endeavors to explain that it is not only the promise of light entertainment that draws the reader, but also the possibility that in an easy way they can read about existential questions such as self-development  and life -choices. As well as mapping out Chick Lit´s specific characteristics, followed by previous research on the subject and the litterateur’s history, I have found it interesting to discuss the female characters, their personalities and life choice’s against a backdrop of existentialistic philosophy. In my research of this form of literateur I have discovered that chick lit often deals with existential universal problems, and that in order to be entertaining these books must contain a serious element.

At the turn of the century 18/1900 Swedish law looked upon young people as being adults at about the age of 15. At 15, the young person had left school, had his first employment and provided for himself and also had been confirmed to full membership of the Swedish State Church. Thus he was to be considered an adult and responsible for his actions. Parents, society/school and Church had done what was expected of them and now it was up to the 15-years old to live according to the laws and to be punished if the laws were broken. Over the following hundred years, at the time of the millennium, Swedish society changed a lot. So the laws did not and still a young person of 15 is considered an adult in the eye of the Swedish law. This paper looks upon the ideas that the law was based on at the turn of the century 18/1900 and the ideas that are put forward by Swedish courts today. The law has not changed, but today Swedish young people leave school between the ages of 19-25, and find their first employment even later. The paper gives the historical background and looks at the underlying ideas of adulthood. How people think and what is considered being important in defining aduldthood has not changed much over those hundred years. In deciding if a person could pass as an adult, the Swedish law still use the same premisses today as it did a hundred years ago. As these premissies and ideas are the same, though society has changed, you can’t today be considered an adult until in your twenties.

This doctoral thesis identifies and analyzes narratives of Greenland's future that emerged in the context of developing and modernizing the dependency's natural resources industries in the 1900s until the 1960s. After almost two centuries of Danish colonial rule, the turn of the 20th century witnessed a profound change in Greenland's governance. Although contested at first, the notion of cultural progress increasingly linked developing a modern industry to a productive economy under Danish auspices. Ideas of modernity that connected rationalities of the market with political power and science were unparalleled in the colonial discourse on Greenland's future. How were the development of Greenland's natural resource industries and its role in Danish governance debated? Which narratives emerged in this context? As the studies in this compilation thesis suggest, the rationalities of science, markets, and power became entangled in an unprecedented way during these decades, creating new ways to imagine Greenland's future. The first paper analyzes the application of a private stakeholder group of Copenhagen's financial and economic elite for access to Greenland as a private, for-profit venture to extract and trade with the colony's living resources in 1905. The motif of an Arctic scramble was constructed through the authority of science, still resonating in the debate on rare earth mining today. The second paper identifies the business relationships between the group's members, connecting major Danish financial institutes and private economic interests in the late 19th and early 20th century. The third paper focuses on the commercialization of Greenlandic fisheries in the 1910s until the late 1920s and the fisheries scientist Adolf Severin Jensen (1866-1953). Jensen's work is an example of how applied sciences connected both scientific and political agendas, carried out in a colonial setting. The fourth paper focuses on the narrative analysis of (Danish-language) Greenlandic newspaper coverage of Qullissat between 1942 and 1968. Representations of the coal mine and nearby settlement on Greenland's west coast, which were closed down in 1972, are at the center of this study. While the coal mine was presented as a Danish success to establish an independent energy supply and to introduce modernization measures, it was presented as a Greenlandic failure to adapt to modern demands of economic productivity in the years leading up to its closure.

The aim of the dissertation is to study the problem definitions and the governmental rationality of new activities aimed at reforming criminals, the poor and workers in Sweden during the mid-1800s. Three case studies analyse the solitary confinement penitentiary, the district visiting poor relief and the bildung-society for workers. A fourth case study analyses the introduction of crime statistics and prison photography. I argue that these different activities were part of the historical process that have been characterised as ”the birth of the social” and the new governmental rationality, ”liberal governmentality”. The initiators presupposed that civilisation had negative behavioural consequences among the lower classes. At the same time they expressed optimism regarding new fostering instances and how such could be integrated to a mutually supporting network. The aims of the new reformatory principles were regularly described as capacities for self-reflection, self-regulation and self-control among the lower classes. The dissertation shows that the new activities localised and defined a new set of problems and questions in terms of the social. ”Society” was what was to be protected as its ”inner” relationships were described as going through comprehensive historical changes. The ambition to lead, manage and organise the behaviours and values of the lower classes was even more far-reaching than was the desire to exert direct discipline. Order, well being and morals were integrated in a field of problems where effects on the lifestyles of the lower classes constituted the ultimate authoritative body.

<p>The question this essay sets out to answer is what role God plays in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in the book “Of a Christian Common-wealth”, in relationship to humans as moral beings. The question is relevant as the religious aspects of Hobbes’s thinking cannot be ignored, although Hobbes most likely had rather secular and sceptical philosophical views. In order to answer the research question Leviathan’s “Of a Christian Common-wealth” will be compared and contrasted with two contextual works: the canonical theological document of the Anglican Church, the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), and Presbyterian-Anglican document the Westminster Confession (1648). Also, recent scholarly works on Hobbes and more general reference works will be employed and discussed. Hobbes’s views provide a seemingly unsolvable paradox. On the one hand, God is either portrayed, or becomes by consequence of his sceptical and secular state thinking, a distant God in relationship to moral humans in “Of a Christian Common-wealth”. Also, the freedom humans seem to have in making their own moral decisions, whether based on natural and divine, or positive laws, appears to obscure God’s almightiness. On the other hand, when placing Hobbes in context, Hobbes appears to have espoused Calvinist views, with beliefs in predestination and that God is the cause of everything. Rather paradoxically it not unlikely that Hobbes espoused both the views that appear to obscure the role of God, and his more Calvinistic views.</p>

A basic assumption in the thesis is that every economic as well as political and ethical doctrine contains a conception of man, and, thus, that this conception needs to be scrutinised in order to achieve deeper understanding of the doctrine. The purposes of the thesis is (1) to account for conceptions of man within the rarely studied Swedish seventeenth-century economic thought, (2) to examine how conceptions of man and of society influence and shape this thought, and (3) to do this from a synchronous approach, by which emphasis is laid on economic thought as an integral part of the intellectual culture of the epoch. In chapter 2 is explored the conception of man as expressed in economic thought. Man is conceived as selfish and irrational. In chapter 3, this conception is explained as it is placed within a wider context, the most common psychological theory of the epoch, the theory of the passions, which is thoroughly examined. Chapter 4 consists of an analysis of the theory of householding, as it was expressed in the literature of the epoch. It is shown that this theory, not focused on by earlier research, to a large extent is a part of ethics and a prolongation of the theory of passions. The householder or “house-father” is obliged to control his own as well as the other household-member’s passions, and to maintain the hierarchical order within the household. Chapters 5 to 8 deal with the central areas within economic thought. These areas are domestic production and trade (ch. 5), the sumptuary laws and attitudes towards luxury (ch. 6), the use of the concept of free trade (ch. 7) and the issues of idleness and employment (ch. 8). It is shown that the king or government is viewed as the “house-father” of the realm, and that the core of the theory of the passions, the taming of the passions through reason and virtue, is vital also within economic thought, in which four virtues were central: justice, diligence, temperance and frugality; the same virtues as in the theory of householding.

The question this essay sets out to answer is what role God plays in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in the book “Of a Christian Common-wealth”, in relationship to humans as moral beings. The question is relevant as the religious aspects of Hobbes’s thinking cannot be ignored, although Hobbes most likely had rather secular and sceptical philosophical views. In order to answer the research question Leviathan’s “Of a Christian Common-wealth” will be compared and contrasted with two contextual works: the canonical theological document of the Anglican Church, the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), and Presbyterian-Anglican document the Westminster Confession (1648). Also, recent scholarly works on Hobbes and more general reference works will be employed and discussed. Hobbes’s views provide a seemingly unsolvable paradox. On the one hand, God is either portrayed, or becomes by consequence of his sceptical and secular state thinking, a distant God in relationship to moral humans in “Of a Christian Common-wealth”. Also, the freedom humans seem to have in making their own moral decisions, whether based on natural and divine, or positive laws, appears to obscure God’s almightiness. On the other hand, when placing Hobbes in context, Hobbes appears to have espoused Calvinist views, with beliefs in predestination and that God is the cause of everything. Rather paradoxically it not unlikely that Hobbes espoused both the views that appear to obscure the role of God, and his more Calvinistic views.

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Inna Sevelius: Bristande självhävdelse och självständighet: En studie av neurosbegreppet hos Tora Sandström. Uppsala universitet: Inst. för idé- och lärdomshistoria, magisteruppsats, vårtermin, 2010.   Uppsatsens syfte är att bidra till historiseringen av neurosbegreppet genom en analys av begreppet hos en kvinnlig pionjär inom psykoanalysen i Sverige. Studien inbegriper en diskussion av Sandströms neurosbegrepp i relation till annan samtida psykoanalytisk teori och andra samtida tankeströmningar samt en analys av begreppets konsekvenser för Sandströms syn på barnuppfostran och på den terapeutiska praktiken. Enligt Sandström uppstår neuroser pga bristande självhävdelse under uppväxten. Hon betonar särskilt aggressionshämningens betydelse. En bristande självhävdelse leder enligt Sandström till osjälvständighet, men min analys visar på en könsskillnad i detta avseende. I linje med samtidens essentialistiska och komplementära syn på kön beskriver Sandström författaren Ernst Ahlgrens strävan efter självständighet som neurotisk. I senare skrifter antyds däremot könsskillnader baserade på uppfostran. Sandströms neurosbegrepp är vidare förankrat i biologin. Hon diskuterar såväl människans medfödda förutsättningar för psykisk utveckling med koppling till samtida evolutionsteori som neurosens kroppsliga symtom och visar här ett tidstypiskt intresse för psykosomatik. I sin syn på barnuppfostran ligger hon i linje med den samtida s.k. frihetspedagogiken. Sandström invänder mot Freud i flera avseenden, men framför allt när det gäller hans fokus på sexual-hämning som den väsentliga orsaken till neurotiska besvär. Min analys visar – till skillnad från tidigare forskning – att hennes relation till Alfred Adler är ambivalent. Förmodade influenser från Wilhelm Reich samt den norske psykoanalytikern Harald Schjelderup hör också till sådant som inte uppmärksammats av tidigare forskning.