<p> This dissertation employs a hermeneutic methodology via deductive and imaginal approaches which chiefly rely on <i>Liber Novus</i> and Jung&rsquo;s <i>Collected Works</i> to examine image 169 and critically situate the work in a hermeneutic framework. The purpose of this study is to explore the likely relationship between image 169 and Jung&rsquo;s personal myth and his individual cosmology. I also consider how image 169 may shed light on the meaning of Jung&rsquo;s psychology and analyze the figures depicted in image 169. Jung did not realize his personal myth until around 1930, which coincides with the probable year he began painting image 169. From the earliest moments of Jung&rsquo;s childhood, he experienced elaborate fantasies, which culminated in his confrontation with the unconscious. Between 1913 and 1916, Jung documented his fantasies in a series of black notebooks, which he later transcribed into <i>Liber Novus: The Red Book.</i> Jung&rsquo;s experiences during this time period compelled him to consider the relationship between the living personality and the community of the dead. Image 169 suggests a pictorial formulation of Jung&rsquo;s psychology and what I have termed as the apocatastasis of the dead. Both Western and Eastern sources seem to have influenced Jung&rsquo;s rendering of the image, as evidenced by his study of Zimmer&rsquo;s <i>Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of India, </i> the <i>Shri-Chakra-Sambhara Tantra,</i> and the fantasies of Kristine Mann.</p>

<p> Leibniz makes substantive use of harmony and metaphysical perfection, but he very rarely offers more than a brief gloss in direct explanation of these terms. I argue that they name the same fundamental property. The definition of metaphysical perfection (hereafter, "perfection") as unity-in-variety misleads if taken as a reduction of perfection to separately necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for anything to enjoy perfection. The definition of harmony in terms of intelligibility leads to the same underlying notion, for intelligibility is defined in terms of unity and variety.</p><p> Chapter 1 introduces the tension between Leibniz's substantive use of perfection and his demand that it meet a high standard of intelligibility. Chapter 2 argues that there is no satisfactory account of compossibility in the literature because each of the viable proposals misunderstands the role of perfection. The current dispute rests in a disagreement about the best reductive account of perfection: either to sheer variety, or to variety and unity as independently intelligible but inversely proportional criteria for perfection. Either way, incompossibility relations become externally applied limits on God's will to maximize the variety of existing substances. Leibniz rejects all such external limits. I propose a new solution, in which two possibles are compossible if and only if they are jointly thinkable, that is, if they are members of an ideal unity. This involves a distinction between the variety that does contribute to unity and the variety that does not&mdash;and this distinction requires that we already have some notion of perfection prior to the appeal to variety.</p><p> Chapter 3 develops this account of perfection and incompossibility further, by introducing another puzzle God aims to create the most perfect world, but worlds are aggregates and aggregates seem to rank too low in Leibniz's ontology to explain God's aim. What is the world that God would care for it? God, being wise, does not and would not will multiple times in creating. Rather, God creates multiple substances through a single act of will. Acts of creative will, though, are individuated by the agent's concept of the object. This suggests that groups of substances are unified into worlds by God's intellect thinking of their many essences under a single idea. This is Leibniz's limited Spinozism: he is a metaphysical atomist about existing things, but a holist about the ideal and its value.</p><p> Chapters 4 and 5 tell the story of how Leibniz came to these views. The narrative is helpful in part because it sheds some light on Leibniz's motivations. Also, I argue that the mistakes common to recent approaches to compossibility have textual support only from premature versions of Leibniz's account of perfection, versions Leibniz rejected in part because they generate the problems discussed in Chapters 2 and 3.</p><p> Chapter 4 explores Leibniz's transition to philosophical maturity in the later 167os. He gave priority to the divine intellect throughout his career, but in the Paris Period, he left no work for the will at all: to exist is to be harmonious, and the existence of finite things depends directly on the divine intellect. This theory had theodicean advantages, but it also led to a necessitarianism just as absolute as Spinoza's. After studying Spinoza and leaving Paris, Leibniz placed the divine will between existence and harmony, or perfection. Perfection and harmony were now associated with God's ideas; coming to exist required, in addition, an act of God's will.</p><p> Having associated harmony with the possibles in God's mind, Leibniz now needed to explain why God does not maximize perfection by creating every substance. Chapter 5 deals with the gradual development after 1678, as Leibniz worked out how to determine the joint value of many independent substances. Just as previously he had separated existence from harmony while retaining a close connection between the two, the mature Leibniz distinguished harmony from the possible substances in God's mind. Harmony and perfection, on this final account, belong even to aggregates, which count as unities thanks only to their relation to a mind. With this in hand, Leibniz was finally in a position to argue that God leaves some possibles uncreated in order the maximize the perfection of what God does create.</p><p> Leibniz defended his commitment to a harmoniously limited, intelligible world by gradually distinguishing perfection from existence and from substantiality. Likewise, we profit by distinguishing Leibnizian perfection from (apparently) more accessible notions.</p>

<p>The plethora of contrary doctrines pertaining to salvation, among the variety of religions in the world today, creates a problem for the sincere investigator who seeks to find out if there is such a thing as salvation and, if there is, how to be saved. These contrary doctrines are problematic to the degree that the sincere investigator is unable to evaluate the probability of some of these doctrines over others. In order to aid the sincere investigator with this problem, I explore methods for evaluating doctrines that purport to affect one?s salvation.

<p> The compensatory control model has been suggested as one way of understanding the complex relationship between the experience of God and the experience of control. This model states that when one's sense of control is threatened, it can be compensated for by increased beliefs in external systems of control (such as a supreme being, or the government) that are thought to provide one with a general sense that the world is in order. Previous research has produced evidence for the compensatory control model, but has failed to consider a conceptual distinction between the personal experience of God (God Image) and the conceptual understanding of God (God Concept). A sample of 135 participants whose demographics closely resemble the population of academia took a brief internet survey measuring a dimension of God Image, and general sense of control. Statistical analysis of the correlation produced a coefficient of r = .13 that was not statistically significant. Contradicting the study hypothesis, the findings suggest that general sense of control was not related to how much one experiences God as present in his or her life. Implications for the fields of sociology, theology, and psychology are discussed.</p><p> <i>Keywords</i>: God image, God concept, control, compensatory control, religiosity</p>

This dissertation argues that Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy must be understood as an attempt to hold together a robust commitment to divine transcendence and an affirmation of immanent human activity. This argument is developed through an examination of Kant's Copernican revolution, or his account of how human beings must play an active rather than merely passive role in the theoretical and practical domains. Kant's revolution involves an appeal to what can be called our self-legislation, or our role in giving ourselves laws that structure our cognition and volition. A persistent strand of interpretation has maintained that Kant's emphasis on our self-legislation, signaled through his Copernican revolution, rules out any significant role for religious or theological claims. Indeed, Kant is often seen as initiating a modern anthropocentric turn, marking the shift away from a pre-modern theocentric perspective. This dissertation shows, however, that rather than privileging either a God-centered or a human-centered perspective, Kant is instead concerned both with what the divine and human share and with what distinguishes them from one another, and this theme is borne out in Kant's theoretical philosophy, his practical philosophy, and his philosophy of religion. The dissertation is divided into three parts, each of which corresponds to one of Kant's famous three questions: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? These questions map on to Kant's theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, and philosophy of religion, respectively. Kant sometimes added a fourth question: What is the human being? The dissertation suggests that Kant's answers to these first three questions involve an account of what it means to be a human being and thereby also serve to address his fourth question. This examination of Kant's Copernican revolution suggests that his anthropology is not a substitute for a discarded theology, but is itself theologically inflected. The dissertation draws on a number of works from Kant's mature corpus, including his three Critiques and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, as well as other works of his theoretical and practical philosophy, including the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

<p>Hua-yen Buddhism is generally considered as the most theoretical and systematic presentation of Buddhist ideas among the various Buddhist schools that appeared in China during the Sui-T'ang period (589-900 A.D.). Furthermore, its philosophico-religious teachings played a significant role in the religious history of East Asia. In spite of such an importance, very little is known about Hua-yen Buddhism in the Western world. This thesis, therefore, attempts to achieve a proper understanding of Hua-yen Buddhism through an extensive investigation of its central doctrine of dharmadhātu(fa-chieh) as it occurs in the writings of the patriarchs of the Hua-yen school. Part One, as a background study, examines first of all the etymological and contextual meaning of the term dharmadhātu. It also surveys the Avatamsaka-sūtra(Hua-yen ching), the canonical scripture from which the Hua-yen school derived the idea of dharmadhātu as the central theme for teaching and meditation. In addition, it discusses the background and development of the Hua-yen school. In Part Two, the main body of the study, the dharmadhātu doctrine of the Hua-yen school is examined in terms of its development. The basic writings of its five patriarchs and their ideas concerning "the dharmadhātu are chronologically and systematically analyzed in detail. It is demonstrated that the dharmadhātu doctrine can be said to have been, by and large, founded by Tu-shun, formulated by Chih-yen, systematized by Fa-tsang, and elucidated by Ch'eng-kuan and Tsung-mi. Part Three, the concluding part, embarks upon an inquiry into the significance of the Hua-yen dharmadhātu doctrine. It is argued that the dharmadhātu doctrine is not "a pointless exposition of empty words," as characterized by some outside critics, but that it contains solid "philosophical," "religious," and "historical" significance within it. First, it is clarified that the dharmadhātu doctrine is meant to lead man toward an insight into the interrelatedness, that is, the "mutual identification" and "interpenetration," of all the dharmas — an insight which liberates him from all kinds of rigid philosophical preconceptions and dogmatism concerning reality. Second, it is also discovered that the dharmadhātu doctrine of mutual identification and interpenetration is relevant to the formulation of the religious conviction of the "instantaneous attainment of Buddhahood" upheld by the Hua-yen school. Finally, it is verified through concrete evidence that the dharmadhātu doctrine exerted a significant influence on the religious thought of China, especially on the Ch'an(Zen) and the T'ien- t'ai traditions, Taoism, and Neo-Confucianism.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Careful study of the commentaries of both Sankara and Rāmānuja concerning the relationship between Self-knowledge and dharma confirmed the usual doctrinal differences between them which have been the focal point of scholarship on Vedānta but as well it also uncovered areas of structural convergence co-existing with the former. Accordingly this investigation proceeded on two levels: the first level was concerned with those difference in their ontologies; the second level was concerned with the "meaning-structures" common to both. Previous scholarship on Vedānta has not made reference to these areas of structural convergence. The objective of this work has been to verify how these areas of structural convergence throw light on their respective explicit positions.</p> <p>The following are the major findings of this work: Whereas generally Sankara and Rāmānuja have been understood in terms of their doctrinal differences, with special attention to Rāmānuja's explicit refutation both of Sankara's māyā-vāda and his doctrine of Brahman as Nirguna, I have sought out and argued for a common ground between them. Sankara is usually understood as arguing for a radical discontinuity between Self-knowledge and dharma. I have demonstrated his implicit concession to their community is sāndhana and his use of two key categories to explain this apparent continuity: (i) Self-knowledge in its "secondary sense" as vrtti-jnana and (ii) dharma in its "primary sense" and jnana-yoga. Rāmānuja is usually understood as arguing for a continuity between Self-knowledge and dharma. I have shown his implicit emphasis on their discontinuity which is especially evident when dealing with the question of prapatti where a discontinuity is set up between dharma, understood as man's own isolated efforts and Self-knowledge, understood as Self-surrender, which is surrender to the Lord as the "eternally established means".</p> <p>Two distinct but inseparable strands were discovered in both Sankara and Rāmānuja. They were respectively designated as the "explicit Sankara", the "implicit Sankara" , and the "explicit Rāmānuja" and "implicit Rāmānuja". Two major areas of structural convergence were discovered between these strands: between the "implicit Rāmānuja" and the "explicit Sankara"; and between the "explicit Rāmānuja" and the "implicit Sankara", The structural convergence between the "implicit Rāmānuja" and the "explicit Sankara" threw light on their explicit areas of agreement on the nature of dharma which they share as Vedānta. The structural convergence between the "explicit Rāmānuja" and the "implicit Sankara" threw light on their explicit areas of agreement, which they share as Vedānta, on the nature of Self-knowledge.</p> <p>Areas of tension between their doctrines and methods were uncovered. The most striking example of such a tension is illustrated by Rāmānuja's explicit rejection both of Sankara's two levels of truth and of his māyā-vāda, in the context of Rāmānuja's use of methodological equivalents.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p> Murakami Haruki's primary readership consists of Japan's four million born between 1978 and 1990&mdash;an Ice Age of hiring freezes and layoffs. Murakami's cynical antiheroes modeled a blas&eacute; and passive cool. Japanese youth assimilated his tenor and tone. A moral struggle was missing. Following Tokyo's 1995 cult-instigated gas attacks, the repatriating author delved into his 1997-98 reportage, <i>Underground</i>. Despairing apocalyptic outlooks among the economically abandoned respondents rocked Murakami's insularity. The shock engendered his unprecedented compassion.</p><p> This thesis arises from phenomena revealed by current events' intersection with moral philosophy and disposition theory. This thesis claims that Murakami's compassion for Japan's stymied youth triggered his transformation from creating detrimental art to work of engaged responsibility, and that his moral turn manifests first as the 2002 didactic novel, <i>Kafka on the Shore</i>. Murakami's ensuing integration of moral values in his postmodernist narratives has led to the short-list for the Nobel Prize.</p>

No description available.

Positive social interaction between members of opposing social groups (intergroup contact) is an effective method of prejudice reduction (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). This thesis explores how intergroup contact theory can be applied to age groups to reduce ageism towards older adults. Chapters 1 to 3 form the theoretical chapters of the thesis. Chapter 1 defines psychological processes underpinning ageism, provides details of its prevalence, outlines its consequences in society, and gives a justification for its reduction. Chapter 2 introduces the psychological processes underpinning intergroup contact theory and its different formations. This is followed by a literature review of intergenerational contact research, which identifies research gaps in the field and research questions addressed in this thesis. Four empirical chapters then present findings from eight studies. In Chapter 4, Study 1 provides initial correlational evidence of the relationships between direct intergenerational contact, ageism and related psychological processes. Chapter 5 addresses the research question of whether extended contact can be successfully applied to age groups. Studies 2, 3 and 4 provide novel evidence that extended intergenerational contact reduces ageism and is effective via reduced intergroup anxiety, ageing anxiety and ingroup norms. These studies also support prior research demonstrating that direct contact reduces ageism via intergroup and ageing anxieties. Chapter 6 presents two studies that extend the focus of the thesis to include age stereotypes. Secondary analysis of national survey data in Study 5 explores the perception of older adults' competence across the lifespan and friendships with older adults. The degree to which young and middle-aged adults perceive that competence declines with age is attenuated by having as little as one older friend. Building on these findings, Study 6 explores the relationships between direct and extended intergenerational contact, ageist attitudes and warmth and competence stereotypes. Corroborating Chapter 4, both direct and extended contact predicted reduced ageism and are effective via increased competence stereotypes and increased warmth stereotypes. In the final empirical chapter in the thesis Chapter 7 presents two studies that explore intergenerational contact theory in applied contexts. Using an experimental design, Study 7 evaluated an intergenerational programme in which students had conversations with older adults about their technology use. Compared to a control group, the experimental group rated older adults as warmer yet more incompetent. However, only warmth and not incompetence stereotypes formed indirect pathways to subsequent attitudes towards older adults more widely. Study 8 examined care workers positively and negatively experienced intergenerational contact with care home residents. Although care workers experienced more positive than negative contact, negative (but not positive) contact was associated with their attitudes towards care home residents and it generalised to older adults more widely. This indirect effect of negative contact to older adults was effective only for subtle and not blatant ageist attitudes. Overall, the thesis provides a range of evidence suggesting that intergroup contact theory can be successfully applied to the reduction of ageism. It presents a detailed overview of current knowledge, corroborates existing evidence and presents novel findings for extended contact and mediators of both direct and indirect intergenerational contact.