This thesis elaborates a notion of Bergsonian personhood that is particularly well suited for understanding the corporate person. Personalists have contributed much to the study of personhood, but they also fail to fully embrace the image of the embodied person offered by Bergson, from which their work appears to emerge. My concern for freedom is part of what animates this study, but I am not framing a new theory of freedom. Rather, I am trying to bring a broader conception of what freedom means to bear on the subject of personhood. To this end, I present the work of Bergson. I distinguish the terms ‘self’ and ‘person,’ defending self as being more properly outlined by the subjective and fleeting nature of the individual. Then, I discuss Bergson’s connections to personalism, with particular attention to the tradition that grew out of Boston University at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, I give a Bergsonian account of personhood that emphasizes the self’s freedom of creative expression, richly connected to its environment, which is elaborated over time in a movement of becoming personal. I make the case that Bergson’s treatments of self and person greatly aid our investigations into personhood socially, legally, and philosophically.

This dissertation considers the supportive and complementary relation between Mark Johnson’s embodied realism and Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do as a philosophical practice. In exploring this relationship, the emphasis on one’s embodiment condition and its relationship with metaphor and self-expression are the primary focus. First, this work involves providing an introduction to and an exploration of Johnson’s understanding of embodiment and his pragmatic realism with its foundation in metaphorical expression. Second, Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do serves as a kind of exemplification and possible case of effective metaphorical development founded upon a desire for metaphorical-based self-expression of a combat philosophy of embodiment. Third, an analysis of the convergence between the use of metaphor-based embodiment in Lee’s and Johnson’s philosophies is considered. In this respect, both views serve to promote communication and evolution of self-expression as a consequence of certain metaphors. In the final area of analysis, Peirce’s phenomenology offers an understanding of how Lee’s and Johnson’s metaphor-based embodiment provides a fuller context and awareness of the phenomena of embodiment.

Med utgångspunkt i George Lakoff och Mark Johnsons teori om den konceptuella metaforen analyseras i denna uppsats bildspråket i opionsjournalistiska texter som behandlar frågan om individualiserad föräldraförsäkring. Därtill anläggs med hjälp av Yvonne Hirdmans teori om genussystemet ett genuserspektiv, för att undersöka om metaforerna är könade och/eller reproducerar det binära könstänkandet. Materialet är hämtat från DN, Aftonbladet, Expressen och SvD under perioden januari 2010-novmeber 2013.

This dissertation examines the academic debate that surrounds the new field called "Evolutionary Psychology." Evolutionary psychology has emerged as the most popular successor theory to human sociobiology. Its proponents search for evolved psychological mechanisms and emphasize universal features of the human mind. My thesis is that in order to flourish evolutionary psychologists must engage other researchers on equal terms -- something they have not been doing. To show this, I examine the stances of practitioners from three other social science fields whose claims have been shortchanged by evolutionary psychology: Barbara King in biological anthropology, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in empirical linguistics and Annette Karmiloff-Smith in developmental psychology. These researchers are also involved in cognitive science investigations that bear on evolutionary psychology's key claims about the mind and how it works. Evolutionary psychologists make three key claims about the mind. The first (1) is that the mind is massively modular; the second (2) is that this massively modular mind has been shaped by the processes of natural selection over evolutionary time; and the third (3) is that it is adapted to the Pleistocene conditions of our past. Evolutionary psychologists seek to elevate these three claims to the status of meta-theoretical assumptions making them the starting place from which our deliberations about human cognition ought proceed. These claims would constitute the framework for a new paradigm in the ultimate sense. I argue that elevating these claims to such a status is not only premature, but also unwarranted on the available evidence. This result is justified by evidence produced outside evolutionary psychology by those disciplines from which evolutionary psychologists explicitly seek to distance themselves. / Ph. D.

Religious language has been theorized in multiple ways. I will look at how religious language has been theorized in the work of Jürgen Habermas and in the field of cognitive linguistics. I will compare these approaches to religious language and assess the results. In doing so, I will indirectly assess the confluence of these two theoretical approaches. My conclusion is that even with the similarities between these theoretical frames, religion is thematized differently under each method. Jürgen Habermas’s definition of religion as the output of ritual praxis is not compatible with the normative place of religious language found in cognitive linguistics.

This thesis aims to analyze and interpret a number of central works – Vimpelstaden (1985), Som en gång varit äng (1988), Blomman och människobenet (2003), I en cylinder i vattnet av vattengråt (2005) and Vad hjälper det en människa om hon häller rent vatten över sig i alla sina dagar (2009) – by the Swedish poet Ann Jäderlund (1955-) in the context of phenomenology and affect theory. The analysis consists of three chapters and proceeds chronologically with technical scrutinies of separate phases of Jäderlund’s œuvre – from the aphasic-like treatment of established phraseologies in Vimpelstaden and frozen expressions of the botanical discourse in Som en gång varit äng, to the uncanny focus on perceptual patterns as such in her later works. Throughout these analyses the thesis observes a series of techniques with which the author presents us with a kind of sensory paradox, through a) creating language-based complex appearances, non-appropriable by means of the normal perceptual patterns of embodied perception, while still b) simulating, and thus implicitly emphasizing, these appearances as something already concretely looked at and felt. In short, to experience what cannot be experienced, to live the unlivable. Many of these technical observations made are pinned down analytically using concepts from the field of cognitive poetics, namely George Lakoff and Mark Johnsons findings of experiential image schemata underpinning spoken phraseologies and their influential theories on conceptual metaphors. The interpretative conclusion following these observations is that Jäderlund handles her writing aesthetically as a kind of sensory material in a very literal sense, a “being of sensation” in the terminology of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Not as means of experiential or intellectual representation, not as some sort of critical enterprise through mere language-gaming of free- floating signifiers – but as a material able to preserve and perform sensory processes immanent to its own material compilation, a tendency that earlier research fails to grasp or simply ignores altogether. Thus the affectivity immanent to the literary material – often being the starting point of studies in affect theory and cognitive poetics – is here proven to be a characteristic, thereby playing the role more of a conclusion than a field of inquiry. The aesthetics of interrogating the limits of sensory experience, introducing a sort of crisis to embodied perception through the experience of poetic language – and the experience of it as having a “metaphysical significance”, as French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau- Ponty puts it – is articulated in the thesis against the background of influential readings of modern art carried out by Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.