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This thesis places for consideration the esoteric teachings of Alice A. Bailey, written between 1919 and 1949, as part of the theosophical current of western esotericism. Bailey’s overarching concern for human betterment underpins her appropriation of esoteric thought, into a reformulation that incorporates her own version of Christian faith. Bailey argues that humanity faces a major turning point, involving a reorientation towards spiritual living. Alongside the vast number of contemporary writers seeking similar goals, Bailey’s work constitutes another voice attempting to foster such change. Investigating how well the esoteric contents of Bailey’s work serve her intention drive this research. The author follows with some critical reflections upon Bailey’s work with relation to its potential to transform consciousness, reorienting a reader towards spiritual living and human betterment. After exploring aspects of her work considered opposite to transforming consciousness, the author speculates upon how Bailey’s texts might achieve her goal. In essence, it is found that any transformation that may occur through exposure to Bailey’s texts results from a reader’s own efforts at penetrating to the heart of esoteric thought, and not through the adoption or application of esotericism. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis--Freiburg. / Bibliography: p. [ix]-xiv.

Thesis--Freiburg. / Bibliography: p. [ix]-xiv.

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This thesis, an anthropological dialogue with design, seeks to explore the formation of the material world beyond objects. The work is situated within the fields of design studies and social anthropology, and contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of design anthropology. It draws on my education and perspective as a designer and engineer, my field dialogues with contemporary practitioners and the writings of the media philosopher Vilém Flusser, the social anthropologist Tim Ingold and the architect Kengo Kuma. I begin with a consideration of the material world as all matter which forms the earth, its atmospheres and the dwellings and features of many organisms. Such a notion of the material world is abundant with life, energy and potential and recognises human perception as entwined with lineages of materials, making and transformation. However design has evolved, I argue, to become a practice that tends to obscure the energetic and entangled conditions of the world, by way of presenting materials in the form of objects; discrete and enclosed material entities. This results in an impoverishment of environmental perception and a clotting of the ecological currency of materials. To understand how materials come to be formed into objects, I attend to a site of contemporary engineering practice where designers work with materials, tools and computational media in the formation of a product: in this case the royal relay baton for the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Drawing on a period of sustained participant observation with one Glasgow-based company, I observe how lines of practice course through intention, gesture, conversation, writing, drawing, modelling and making, as materials are projected and presented in object form. I highlight the specific dispositions and activities of individual practitioners as they orient their perception towards different ways of knowing materials and specific practices of formation. Here, it becomes evident that design is, fundamentally, a social practice, constituted in an ongoing dialogue between people, matter and energy. Drawing the strands together, I argue that design is not so much a point-to-point procedural process, as an active matrix of social, material and energetic interchange, in which performance and form are intertwined in the transformation of people, materials and surrounds. Within this matrix of activity, the condition of the object is notably evident - and often dominating - but not absolute or inevitable, and there always exist possibilities for manifestations of form beyond objects. Following this prospect, the thesis rounds not to a closure, but to an opening: to the possibility of design as a practice of material performance led by the attentiveness, critique and imagination of an anthropological education.

Cheung Ching-yuen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-123). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.5 / Chapter I --- The Study of Man --- p.8 / Chapter II --- Philosophical Anthropology and other Sciences of Man --- p.11 / Chapter III --- Max Scheler and Philosophical Anthropology --- p.17 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Scheler's Concept of Person --- p.29 / Chapter I --- The Concepts of Person --- p.30 / Chapter II --- Scheler's Ethical Personalism --- p.40 / Chapter III --- "Person, Community and World" --- p.48 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Scheler's Concept of Man --- p.54 / Chapter I --- The Concepts of Man --- p.55 / Chapter II --- Man as ens amans --- p.71 / Chapter III --- Spirit and Life --- p.90 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Conclusion --- p.102 / Note --- p.107 / Bibliography --- p.118

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 1999. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [479]-489). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ56242.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science, 2000. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-312).

Thesis (M. A. in Philosophy)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2009. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.