ABSTRACT Around 65 AD, the Ancient Roman philosopher Seneca wrote his only text concerning Natural Phenomenon: Natural Questions. Considered since medieval times as part of a trinity of great thinkers including Plato and Aristotle, Seneca’s work in rhetoric, philosophy, and legal theory still receive praise today. The praise is not replicated for Natural Questions, however. Modern historians who consider the work paint it as uninspiring. Pliny, another Roman author and philosopher, wrote a far more encompassing and detailed work called Natural History, and it is this work that is considered the premier Roman comment on Natural Philosophy. These contemporaneous works become juxtaposed and used to criticize Seneca’s work as inferior. A deeper consideration of the texts --primarily the subject material and use of poetry-- will determine that Seneca and Pliny wrote to different audiences and belong to different genres.

This thesis seeks to dispel the notion that Nazi ideology was merely an afterthought to numerous actions taken by the Nazis. The first chapter discusses how Nazism’s earliest adherents internalized notions from World War I into an ideology that would motivate the early Nazi Movement to launch the Beer Hall Putsch. The second chapter focuses on the Nazi Party’s electoral tactics and how those actions correlated with entrenched Nazi ideological notions of recognition and community. Finally, the third chapter will seek to demonstrate that the numerous repressive measures implemented by the Third Reich were part of a general plan to prepare a future generation of Nazi citizens for, the worldwide struggle for existence. This work exists as a counter to a considerable amount of literature in the historiography that, by maintaining Nazi ideology and Nazi actions were two separate entities, belittles the importance of Nazi ideology thereby fundamentally misunderstanding Nazism.

In my thesis, I examine the relationship between modern technology and human autonomy from the philosophical perspective of Martin Heidegger. He argues that the essence of modern technology is the Gestell. Often translated as ‘enframing,’ the Gestell is a mode of revealing, or understanding, being, in which all beings are revealed as, or understood as, raw materials. By revealing all beings as raw materials, we eventually understand ourselves as raw materials. I argue that this undermines human autonomy, but, unlike Andrew Feenberg, I do not believe this process is irreversible from Heidegger’s perspective. I articulate the meaning of the Gestell as an historical claim and how it challenges human autonomy, but may never absolutely eradicate it. Contra Feenberg’s interpretation, I argue that Heidegger’s ontology, including the Gestell, provides a crucial ground for understanding how we might salvage autonomy in a culture increasingly dominated by modern technology. Specifically, by drawing on Heidegger’s conception of Gelassenheit, I suggest that salvaging human autonomy requires a calm acceptance and opening up to the challenge of modern technology. This is not, as Feenberg suggests, a passive acceptance of the eradication of human autonomy. Rather, this is the ontological ground that provides us with the possibility of salvaging autonomy. By opening us up to the essence of modern technology, we understand the contingency of the Gestell, its essentially ambiguous nature, and are granted with the freedom to subordinate its reign to other human values and modes of understanding being.

The intent of this thesis is to examine a portion of the thought and historical events which contributed to the development of the United States as a pragmatic nation, and the resulting influence upon its intellectual attitudes. The pragmatic evolution of America is a logical consequence, given the backgrounds and circumstances of those people who first settled this land. The founders of this country were, for the most part, members of the poor, working class who had grown up under governments adhering to strict caste societies and religious domination by their rulers. They held a common belief in a work ethic and a hope of material and religious improvement in the new land. The vast natural resources and individual freedoms in America were conducive to personal expression and material opportunism, and the formal theology and rigid covenants marked by the Puritan era soon gave way to the westward expansion of a group of people with a sensual religious expression and an overwhelming zeal for material wealth. Their goals were a popular voice in government and the freedom to apply their strengths toward the improvement of their station in life. The formal religious services of a learned clergy were replaced by the camp meetings in the wilderness, conducted by unlearned, ordinary lay ministers. Government by the educated, aristocratic few was likewise replaced by popular elections and the inspiration of men such as Andrew Jackson, who encouraged the ordinary, working man to seize the reigns of power in government and to maximize the opportunities for material success. For most Americans, hard physical work was not only a necessity for survival, it was also the key to a multitude of material desires. Every aspect of American living centered around the practical, pragmatic desire for material success. Religion, science, education, and the arts were useful only in their application to the goal of material advancement. The American bent toward utility was ominous for the intellectual. Viewed with distrust and suspicion, the intellectual was out of step with the mainstream of daily living. His lack of hunger for the material, his inherited wealth, and his appreciation and admiration of European arts seemed unnatural for those who struggled to own more material possessions, and for those who felt no need of European "decadence." The American attitude towards intellectuals is not one of overt hostility, but rather an unfortunate by-product of our national character. Americans have had no time for leisurely pursuits, and the lack of appreciation of intellectuals stems from a nation given more to pragmatic endeavors than to pure intellectual occupations.

In his Treatise On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, the Southern Baptist preacher and educator of the latter nineteenth century, John A. Broadus, acknowledged the influence of classical and contemporary theorists upon his work. Among those named, particularly with regard to notions of argument, was Richard Whately, the Anglican Archbishop and rhetorical theorist of the early nineteenth century. The research task involved in this thesis was to determine whether and to what extent Whately's theory of argument was employed in Broadus's homiletic theory and practice. The writer gathered his data using methods of documentary research. Most of the sources were available at local libraries. Others, however, were obtained from the Universities of Kansas, Iowa, and Michigan. Materials by and concerning Broadus were obtained from various Baptist historical agencies.

This study provides a new account of the evolution of the eighteenth-century British novel by reading it as a response to contemporary interest in, and self-consciousness about, print communication. During the eighteenth century, print went from being a marginal technology to being one with an increasingly wide circulation and a diverse range of applications. The pervasive adoption of print generated anxiety about its positive and negative effects, prompting a series of responses from writers. Examining the work of five British novelists from across the long eighteenth century, this dissertation investigates the influence of eighteenth-century philosophical thinking about human understanding and social interaction on the assumptions that these novelists made about the way their work would be received. In particular, this thesis explores the ways in which these novelists respond to contemporary philosophical ideas about the cognitive functions of the imagination by experimenting with the form of their work in order to generate new kinds of reception. But this study also shows that, while these five novelists drew on the tenets of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, their work exposed a number of the limitations of that philosophy by putting it into practice. Each chapter in this study focuses on a different aspect of the intersection of mediation and imagination. Chapter One considers the ways in which Locke's understanding of probability informed Richardson's attempts to promote specific affective reading practices with his epistolary fictions and editorial commentary. Chapter Two reads Sterne's manipulations of the material page in Tristram Shandy as an attempt to expose the limitations of print communication and to suggest new ways of reading that could overcome those limitations. Chapter Three examines the writing of Smith, Kames, Mackenzie, Reeve and Godwin in order to illustrate both the promise and the danger that these authors attribute to imaginative sympathy and to the reading practices that promote sympathetic reactions. Chapter Four explores Scott's experiments with a form of fiction that could collapse the distance between writing and orality in order to force readers to reevaluate the complex relationship of sound and writing in the establishment of communities in an age of print.

This dissertation represents the first attempt to take account of the entire Swedish œuvre of Marcus Ehrenpreis and view it as a single, coherent statement, recognizing the very fundamental confrontation taking place between tradi­tional and modern ways of viewing reality and its possible resolution. A reading of his work reveals that the one constant in his life in letters was the struggle to reconcile the apparent logical antithesis of universalism and particu­larism, which this dissertation sees as one with resonance for all ethnic minorities. In the Chapter One, a general orientation in the modern Jewish world is provided, including the traditional worlds of Orthodoxy and Hasidism into which he was born; the trend toward the political emancipation of the Jews in Western and Central Europe and the subsequent waves of assimilation among young Jews; the exacerbation of antisemitic tendencies in both Eastern and Western Europe; the emergence of Jewish nationalism, commonly known as Zionism; and the renaissance of Jewish culture which crystallized around these events. Chapter Two offers a social and intellectual biography of Ehrenpreis, providing the reader with the relevant information about his youth, organizational efforts, education, and career as rabbi and author, while Chapter Three posits a perspective from which to approach his work, by describing the generational unit to which he belonged and how the concerns of his youth and early adulthood, shared by other Jewish intellectuals born around the same time as he, shaped the problems with which he grappled throughout his life. The generational perspective also allows the fundamental differences between his own generation and the generations before and after his to emerge in bold relief. It is hoped that in employing this perspective, it becomes clear that the accumulated work of Ehrenpreis can be seen as an integrated whole, which came to full expression during his thirty-five years in Sweden. In Chapter Four, Ehrenpreis' definitions of Jewish religion and Jewish culture and the difference between them are explicated, before proceeding to investigate the way in which he thought the essence of these ideas best be mediated - primarily from the pulpit in his sermons and the intellectual periodical in his writings. The latter in par­ticular he found to be an essential tool for disseminating Jewish culture in Sweden, both to Swedish Jewry and the general Swedish public. Chapters Five and Six deal with what Ehrenpreis considered the two major expressions of Jewish culture, lit­erature and historical knowledge, and the roles they played in the formation of a substantive understanding of Jew­ish culture in the modern world. For him, literature was the bearer of ethics and values and the forum within which these could be transvaluated and made germane to modern man. In his historical writings, he wished to counteract tendencies from within and without the Jewish world which either consigned the Jewish people to the past tense, or overemphasized the role of traumas and catastrophes in its history at the expense of an ongoing, positive and cre­ative Jewish cultural evolution. Chapter Seven concludes the close reading of Ehrenpreis ' Swedish authorship by concentrating on his war­time writings. In referring to the legacy of the Hebrew prophets, the essential cultural values of Jewish tradition as he perceived them emerge: The ideas of social justice, minority rights, and the goal of perpetual peace between nations. He emphasizes their significance for the development of the democratic tradition in Europe as well as their function as the pillars on which the identity of Jews in the modern world could rest. The dissertation closes with a summary of its conclusions. / digitalisering@umu

The paper attempts to analyze the greater influences of the Greek War for Independence through an assessment of the greater forces of the. Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Great Power politics

This thesis hopes to contribute to a reconciliation of the apparent conflict between Eliot's conservative outlook and his formally innovative poetry. I do not advocate stripping Eliot of his modernist label. I would rather amend the term "modernism." This qualification is important because the modernist label carries connotations that simply do not do justice to Eliot. For example, the label implies that modernists wanted to move forward, away from the past. Eliot wanted to move backwards, partly because he felt other artists had left the past behind. In an essay introducing the early twentieth-century modernists, the Norton Anthology of British Literature describes T.S. Eliot's critical and creative projects as "efforts to reinvent poetry."4 That is exactly the opposite of what he was doing. He wanted to stop people from trying to reinvent poetry, because he thought doing so would only lead to bad poems. How can the editors of the Norton Anthology, the closest thing I know to a record of the academic consensus, so completely misunderstand Eliot's project? They fail to appreciate the relationship between Eliot's literary ideas and his attitude toward modernity. I believe the best way to think about Eliot's intellectual project is as an effort to save poetry from the threatening forces of modernity and modernism. The modernist movement and Eliot's ideas are both responses to the same set of dramatic historical changes. Europe transformed itself from 1890 to 1918. In the context of drastic political, technological and social changes described by historians as "the emergence of modernity," Europe's dominant artistic and intellectual value system reorientated itself in favor of newness and forward movement. T.S. Eliot had a different response to historical change. He felt the ongoing historical transformations, self-perpetuated by the resultant emphasis on progress, threatened to uproot and destroy England’s literary tradition. So he took it on himself to save that tradition. 4 Greenblatt, Norton Anthology, 1834.

La plupart des lectures contemporaines des Essais ignore la pensée morale de Montaigne. Ici, je maintiens que Montaigne épouse ‘une éthique de la modestie’ en même temps qu’il rejette toute éthique normative. En particulier, je cherche à aborder comment Montaigne suggère que nous connaissons la vertu et agissons si deux individus ne partagent pas le même perspective et on ne peut pas être le même sujet éthique deux fois. Je vais commencer par discuter la position épistémique de Montaigne par rapport aux universels pour illustrer comment Montaigne met en question l’universalité des lois éthiques et un bien connu a priori comme certains nominalistes et comment la notion de la contingence qui accompagne cette attitude a des implications pour le sujet. Ensuite, je vais explorer comment Montaigne partage et part des penseurs anciens, surtout les sceptiques, afin de façonner une méthode empirique qui a son point de départ dans l’individu. En fouillant sa méthode, qui a son modèle dans le chapitre « De l’expérience », je vais démontrer comment cet aspect de la pensée de Montaigne empêche sa morale de succomber au nihilisme, parce qu’il affirme qu’il reste des phénomènes qu’on peut connaître à posteriori. Je voudrais montrer comment la méthode des Essais aide les individus à exercer leur jugement pratique et former leur intention face aux circonstances changeantes indépendamment des croyances. English Translation : [Most contemporary readings of the Essays ignore Montaigne’s moral thought. In this paper, I assert that Montaigne espouses ‘a modest ethics’ at the same time that he rejects all normative ethical systems. Specifically, I seek to address how Montaigne suggests that we can know virtue and act if no two individuals share the same epistemological position and an individual can never be the same ethical subject twice. I will argue that Montaigne denies human knowledge of metaphysical universals and in this regard resembles medieval nominalists, who held that humans only know individuals and particular instances a posteriori. I will demonstrate that Montaigne’s epistemological modesty influences his ethical position, as he repudiates our capacity to identify an a priori good or a télos to which we should all strive. Because I think that this negative aspect of the Essays does not lead to moral nihilism, I will explore how Montaigne draws and departs from classical thinkers, specifically the Skeptics, in order to fashion an empirical method with the individual ethical subject at its center. I will show how the study of experience outlined in the Essays helps the moral subject to make practical judgments and form intentions with regard to particular circumstances, independently of belief.]