Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Philosophy, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2976. Adviser: Elisabeth A. Lloyd. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 28, 2008).

Taking as a guiding thread the idea of absence or emptiness as a constitutive trait of all images, this dissertation reviews how this idea has been defended or ignored throughout diverse iconoclast moments in Western Christian civilization, focusing on the possible consequences that the basculating movement of acceptance-rejection of the image's emptiness might have for contemporary approaches to the image. The iconoclast debate from the eighth century, and the works of Freud and Lacan will be used as paradigmatic moments to penetrate into the difficult relationship man has had with images and the imaginary throughout an extended period of Western Christian history.

<p> The movie Dogville (2003) provides viewers with a rare and provocative twist on differences between on the one hand the rigorous, Old Testament Jehovah, characterized by rules, and by rewards or punishments in this life, and on the other hand the loving, forgiving Christ and God of the New Testament and later Christianity who are characterized by forgiveness, and by rewards or punishments in an eternal afterlife. The movie, especially its ending, challenges the forgiving nature of the New Testament God and Christ, and makes a case that the Old Testament, rigorous Jehovah is more appropriate, at least for humans who respect themselves as responsible grown-ups. Earlier than these two views of God and man, and still alive and kicking, is a third view, the "Heroic." God is irrelevant here, either as a source of rules or as a source of forgiveness and redemption. Rather, man generates his own meaning by accepting his fate and struggling to do the best he can; this life is all there is and the struggle, i.e. living it is the only meaning. The three views can be seen on a continuum with the Heroic on one end and the forgiving Christ on the other, and the rigorous Jehovah in between and closer to the heroic than to the forgiving. The Dogville point of view, preferring a rigorous God to a forgiving one, is very rarely found in literature (the Grand Inquisitor episode in The Brothers Karamazov is similar to some extent) but both the Heroic and the forgiving Christian views appear everywhere, in all kinds of non-fiction, and either explicitly or as metaphors or parables in fiction. The Heroic view is taken here to include not only classic Greek and Roman heroic writings (e..g. those of Homer and Virgil) but also more modern schools of thought including Nietzsche, the existentialists, and other "God is dead" points of view. The paucity of the first view in literature is mirrored by the small number of its followers: all self-identifying Jews are less than 0.5% of the world's population and the orthodox are a minority within that. In stark contrast, about one-third of individuals world-wide self-identify as Christian. Followers of the Heroic view, roughly measured by self-identifying atheists and perhaps including agnostics, are between 15 and 20 percent of the population of the USA. Focusing on the United States, the data show that the number of adherents of each of the two extremes of an expanded continuum, i.e. the Heroic view on one hand and the born-again Protestant version of the forgiving view on the other, has been growing while the numbers of followers of everything in the middle, i.e. Judaism (excluding its New Age, non-religious variants), Roman Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism have been declining. The waxing and waning of these different views are evaluated in the lights of literature, philosophy, psychology, marketing, and the idea that ideas ("memes" as coined, described and popularized by Richard Dawkins) evolve, endure or disappear according to the Darwinian principle of natural selection. The conclusion is that there are important, long-term reasons for the observed trend, and that therefore both born-again Protestantism and atheism are likely to continue to take market share from their competitors in the middle.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on May 12, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 2961. Advisers: Suzanne E. Eckes; Martha M. McCarthy.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Philosophy, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 23, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4347. Adviser: Paul V. Spade.

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It has become almost universal practice for countries to adopt written constitutions that include a bill of rights. Yet we know little about the origins and evolution of the practice of constitution-writing on a global scale. Are bills of rights defining statements of the nation’s character and identity? Or are they more standardized documents that are similar across countries, and vary only at the margins? Are substantive constitutional features rooted in the society for which they are written, or are they borrowed from elsewhere? What are the origins of the world’s “words of liberty”? This thesis presents the first-ever systematic substantive exploration of the world’s written constitutions. It introduces a new database, based on the coding of the constitutions of 188 countries, for the period 1946-2006. With this data, it explores the historical trajectory of the world’s written constitutions and offers explanations for their substantive content. This thesis's most important finding is that constitutions are inherently “transnational” documents. As it turns out, substantive constitutional choices are remarkably unrelated to local needs and values. Constitutions do not express identity or national character. Instead, the most important predictor of whether any particular country adopts any particular constitutional provision is whether other countries previously did the same thing. Constitutions do not tell stories of the nation’s history, but rather tell stories of transnational interactions and international politics. As a result, constitutions have become at least partly standardized documents that vary along a small number of underlying dimensions. But this thesis also shows that not all constitutions are the same, and that there exists no evidence of a global constitutional convergence. Instead, the world’s constitutions divide in a limited number of constitutional families. This thesis is not currently available in ORA.

Upon entering the male domain of higher education in the late nineteenth-century, college women challenged not only conservative beliefs about women's minds but also restrictive notions about the female body. By the 1920s, attending college had "become the thing to do." Using extensive primary research in college archives, this work examines female students' attitudes toward their bodies in the midst of this cultural transformation This social history makes clear that young women's attitudes toward their bodies developed in relation to a set of cultural discourses that were contested, historically specific, and continually mediated. To explore the impact of ideas about race, class, educational mission, and coeducation on women's attitudes toward their bodies, I analyzed Smith College, Spelman College, and Cornell University. Students' specific experiences were then compared to popular ideals of health, femininity, and female beauty. Prior to the early 1900s, local campus cultures shaped students' ideas about their bodies. At Smith and Cornell, in response to the feared effects of "mental work" on women's femininity and reproductive organs, efforts to prove female health included vigorous exercise, weight gain, and hearty eating. At Cornell, its controversial coeducational design compelled "coeds" to also demonstrate female propriety. For African American students at Spelman Seminary, post-Civil War efforts to counter racist stereotypes dominated bodily concerns. Spelman students resided outside the "protective," race-specific concerns that dominated discussions about white, middle-class women's reproductive health. Beginning in the 1910s, an emergent national student culture rooted in mass consumerism and the idealization of modern youth recast female students' body images. On all three campuses, students donned flapper fashions, bobbed their hair, conducted active mixed-sex social lives, and memorized new nutrition and home economics standards. Yet, even as campus cultures converged, students continued to mediate popular discourses, particularly in regard to dieting practices. While white women joined the "dieting craze," African American women at Spelman College did not.

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Each autumn, in universities from Cardiff to Sydney, young men and women in their late teens or early twenties find themselves in seminar rooms invited to discuss the writings of long-dead European males (mostly males) concerning events and situations that are no longer happening. But these young people are not history students. They are not literature students either, necessarily. They are politics undergraduates. Many of them are already political activists of some shade and some of them, when all this is over, will want to ‘go out’ into the world and make changes to it. They have come to get equipped for the dangers of real-life political action ; to get a politics degree which might make them attractive candidates for civil service positions or for an assistantship at party HQ. They are equipping for the future, they want to know about the future, and they want to be prepared for the currents in which they will soon have to swim: the networks, hierarchies and channels of influence in conjunction with which they will have to operate – present networks, today’s hierarchies and perhaps even tomorrow’s. Yet here they are, engaging not only with today’s political problems, but with yesterday’s, or with those of several centuries past; with Plato’s Republic, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and with a whole cast of authors whose works and words belong, as they soon realise, to the problems of their own time, and seem to offer very little for the solution of today’s. Even on the level of ideology, the challenges of Hobbes, of Rousseau, or of Burke to current thinking are weakened by attendant contexts that are no longer happening, by their ill-suitedness to popular revival, and by their undemocratic obsolescence…